Notes on "même" and its additivity

This paper discusses the behavior of even-like parti cles (e.g. French même) when interacting with entailment based scales, pragmatically incompatible alternatives and semantically incompatible alternatives. Standard approaches to even-like particles assume that such operators convey the asserti on that the prejacent propositi on is true; they also induce a scalar presupposition to the effect that the prejacent propositi on is higher on a suitably defined scale, and an additi ve presupposition to the effect that an alternati ve propositi on in the same scale is also true. We submit preliminary evidence from Italian arguing against the assumption that even-like particles are necessarily additi ve and suggesting that the scalar presuppositions requires a pragmatic (or “rhetorical”) ordering.