[Ads-l] Lovely ambiguity on this afternoon's Google News feed

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Wed Aug 22 00:00:52 UTC 2018


> On Aug 21, 2018, at 4:32 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Aug 21, 2018, at 12:56 PM, Geoffrey Nathan <geoffnathan at WAYNE.EDU> wrote:
>> 
>> "Manafort jury suggests it ‘cannot come to a consensus on a single count’ "
>> 
>> excellent ambiguity on what I vaguely recall (Arnold, help here?) is
>> upward entailing vs. downward entailing readings. Or maybe it's just scope...
> 
> just scope for Neg + Quant: 
>  wider scope on Neg: it's not the case that there's (even) one count on which there's a consensus (there's disagreement on every single count)
>  wider scope on Quant: there's (exactly) one count for which there's no consensus (and there's consensus on all the rest)
> 
>> To the extent I can follow other news stories, there is narrow scope
>> on 'single'--i.e. there is consensus on all but one count.
> 
> arnold
> 
Yes, those are the two readings I got as well, but as it turns out neither was actually (or at least eventually) the case, since there was a consensus (to convict) on 8 counts and no consensus on 10 others.  Not sure about that single count, but maybe their continued deliberation helped.  Seems unlikely that the intended reading was that there was at least one count for which there was no consensus.

LH 
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