From the Department of Cheap Research: Melnick’s Thesis

by Woody Ellen

Consider the following data (as they used to say, making it up out of their heads of course):

(1a)		I want to get married / open a barbershop / buy a horse in my home town.
(1b)		Therefore I want to get married / open a barbershop / buy a horse.

If you want to do something in your home town, then you want to do it, right? Most of the time yes. But:

(2a)		I want to die in my home town.
(2b)	*	Therefore I want to die.

How come the entailment fails in case (2)?

Now there are those who are only hewers of wood and drawers of water, and then there are those who have lambda-abstraction. But it was Mrs. Melnick, down the street, who actually solved the problem.

She showed how certain entailments are blocked by Entailment Blocking Devices, or EBDs, as part of a modality model that interfaces with PCset, PCprop, PC+DN, VRT, PredC and GQ, can handle attitudinals and generalized implicatures, and does all this while making no ontological commitments. Or any commitments at all.

EBDs, according to Mrs. Melnick, account for many problematical blocked entailments, such as the further example in (3), which she volunteered:

(3a)		I want to work on the French Riviera.
(3b)	*	Therefore I want to work.

Until I see something better, I’m going with Mrs. Melnick. She didn’t even charge me anything, although I had to sample her new recipe for low-fat guacamole.

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