A formal pragmatic account of Double Access

Abstract

This paper argues that Double Access sentences in English (Smith, 1978) are a
kind of loose talk. When the meaning of a Double Access sentence is computed literally, the
result is infelicity. Double Access sentences can be used meaningfully only when rescued by
pragmatics which intervenes to interpret the embedded clause loosely. A formal model for
loose interpretation, building on Klecha (2018), is provided.
Keywords: tense, embedding, Double Access, imprecision, defaults, embedded implicature.