Particles, Maximize Presupposition and discourse management

Additive particles are peculiar in that they are often obligatory, although they do not increase the information content of the sentence in context. Two strands of analyses have been proposed to capture this feature, one in terms of exhaustivity implicatures, and one in terms of Heim's “Maximize Presupposition” principle (MP). The article reviews both kinds of approaches, and offers experimental evidence in favor of an MP-based analysis. What remains to be understood is the fact that these particles—unlike other MP-ruled expressions—can also be omitted in certain contexts. The last part of the paper proposes to view MP as a principle which forces the speaker to signal the level of reliability of information in the specific text.