Neg-raising as a scaleless implicature

Abstract

I give a new account of neg-raising with belief predicates as scaleless implicatures, inferences that are predicted by grammatical theories of scalar implicatures, when a quantifier projects subdomain alternatives but no scalar alternative. I argue that the neg-raising inference should be treated as an implicature because of parallels observed in its distribution and that of other known cases of implicatures (namely typical scalar implicatures, free choice effects, and other reported cases of scaleless implicatures). Furthermore, the scaleless implicature account of neg-raising is preferred over the previously proposed analysis by Romoli (2013) of neg-raising as a scalar implicature, because Romoli has to make the ad hoc assumption that 'think' has an excluded middle alternative, while in this new account, the lack of a scalar alternative is predicted by its absence in the lexicon of English, and the presence of subdomain alternatives for quantifiers has been assumed in a variety of other work.