Connecting the Exhaustivity of Clefts and the Homogeneity of Plural Definite Descriptions in Acquisition

Various views exist on the kind of meaning that the exhaustivity component of clefts corresponds to, and therefore on the status that clefts have when exhaustivity is violated. In particular, two semantic theories have recently been spelled out in some detail. According to Velleman et al. (2012), (1) carries the presupposition that it’s not the case that both the truck and something else are blue, and asserts that the truck is, in fact, blue. When exhaustivity fails, the cleft therefore incurs a presupposition failure. The presupposition is, in particular, taken to be akin to that of “only”. Alternatively, Büring & Križ (2013) and Križ (2016) have argued that exhaustivity in clefts should be unified with the phenomenon of homogeneity, which can be observed in plural definite descriptions: both (2a) and (2b) are neither true nor false when the set of trucks is not homogeneous with respect to blueness, i.e. when some are blue and some are not (see, among others, Löbner 2000 and Križ 2015).