Another Myth: The Implicature Theory of Even

With a view to providing a unitary interpretation of a lexical item, even, this paper proposes that even be understood as a quantifier. To countenance this idea, the quantifier theories will be evaluated against the implicature accounts on the basis of conceptual and empirical evidence. With the help of Bach (1999), the quantifier theories of even are regarded as most viable and plausible. On the other hand, from among different quantifier approaches even will be viewed as a quasi-universal quantifier, which means that even is similar to the universal quantifier but still it is different from it. That is, even introduces a comparison set that is context-dependent and only the salient members of this comparison set will be taken into account when an even-sentence is to be uttered. This observation is based on the formal representation for a universal quantifier in general on the one hand and the truth-conditional contribution of even to the sentence containing it.