Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka, to appear.
“On the role of causation in sufficiency and excess.”
Generative Perspectives on Degrees: The Semantics and Morphosyntax of Scalarity.
This paper concerns different conceptualizations for degree constructions of sufficiency and excess in English, with enough and too. According to many prior works, a sufficiency conveys that a measured degree meets or exceeds a minimum degree for some purpose (meeting-the-minimum), whereas an excessive conveys that a measured degree strictly exceeds a maximum degree for some purpose (exceeding-the-maximum). I will instead advocate for a causation-based conceptualization for sufficiency and excess, building on Schwarzschild 2008 and Grano 2022. Together with the monotonicity property of gradable predicates, I show that the causation-based descriptions can derive much of their respective truth conditions without stipulating the connection between sufficiency and meeting-the-minimum and between excess and exceeding-the-maximum as in previous accounts. I then present the facts from certain edge cases where the proposals diverge in their predictions; these prove to be problematic for the classic descriptions for these constructions, but are unproblematic for the causation-based formulation.