Alternativas e inferencias escalares: las construcciones del tipo de como mucho

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to analyze a type of constructions which have not received much attention in the literature: como mucho (‘at most’), como poco (‘al least’), como máximo (‘at most’), por lo menos (‘al least’), etc. I will study two aspects of these expressions: their semantic properties and their incompatibility with negative contexts. On the one hand, I will propose that constructions such as como mucho cancel the conversational implicatures associated to the scalar model in question. On the other hand, I will show that these expressions behave as positive polarity items, so that they cannot occur in negative environments and, having in mind the semantic analysis proposed, I will explain their impossibility of being in negative sentences.