Revisiting Sentence Adverbials and Relevance
Revisiting Sentence Adverbials and Relevance

Author: Irina T. Pandarova

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2023-06-15

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9027252831

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This book offers a fresh take on several long-standing issues relating to the (non-)truth-conditional interpretation of epistemic, evidential, hearsay and attitudinal sentence adverbials. Drawing on a wealth of data from English and German, it shows for the first time that all four adverbial classes can have both truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional (parenthetical) readings. A novel account is presented according to which (non-)truth-conditional readings may arise at either the syntactic or the pragmatic level. Couched in relevance theory, the book also re-examines the explicature and illocutionary status of the adverbial qualification and the qualified proposition, and refines the notions of pointhood and at-issueness to provide an original information-structural analysis applicable to not just sentence adverbials but a range of other propositional qualifiers. Finally, the investigation identifies five factors affecting (non-)truth-conditional interpretation: linear position, prosody, the semantics of the adverbial, its information-structural properties and the wider context. The book will be of interest to those interested in relevance theory, the semantics/pragmatics interface, the syntax/pragmatics interface and information structure, as well as for syntacticians, semanticists and pragmatists interested in sentence adverbials, other propositional qualifiers and parentheticality, syntactic and interpretational.

Revisiting Sentence Adverbials and Relevance
Revisiting Sentence Adverbials and Relevance

Author: Irina T Pandarova

Publisher:

Published: 2023-06-15

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789027213730

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This book offers a fresh take on several long-standing issues relating to the (non-)truth-conditional interpretation of epistemic, evidential, hearsay and epistemic sentence adverbials. Drawing on a wealth of data from English and German, it shows for the first time that all four adverbial classes can have both truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional (parenthetical) readings. A novel account is presented according to which (non-)truth-conditional readings may arise at either the syntactic or the pragmatic level. Drawing on relevance theory, the book also re-examines the explicature and illocutionary status of the adverbial qualification and the qualified proposition, and refines the notions of pointhood and at-issueness to provide an original information-structural analysis applicable to not just sentence adverbials but a range of other propositional qualifiers. Finally, the investigation identifies five factors affecting (non-)truth-conditional interpretation: linear position, prosody, the semantics of the adverbial, its information-structural properties and the wider context. The book will be of interest to those interested in relevance theory, the semantics/pragmatics interface, the syntax/pragmatics interface and information structure, as well as for syntacticians, semanticists and pragmatists interested in sentence adverbials, other propositional qualifiers and parentheticality, syntactic and interpretational.

Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts
Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts

Author: Ewa Jonsson

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2020-10-15

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9027260648

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This volume provides a diachronic and synchronic overview of linguistic variability and change in involved, speech-related and spoken texts in English. While previous works on the topic have focused on more limited time periods, this book covers data from the 16th century up to the present day. The studies offer new insights into historical and present-day corpus pragmatics by identifying and exploring features of orality in a variety of registers. For readers who are new to the field, the range of approaches will provide a helpful overview; for readers who are already familiar with the field, the volume will shed light on the complexity of factors such as register, sociolinguistic variability and language attitude, thus making it a useful resource and stepping stone for further exploration. The volume celebrates the groundbreaking contributions of Professor Merja Kytö in making accessible speech-related corpus material and leading the way in its exploration.

Revisiting Modality
Revisiting Modality

Author: Vítor Míguez

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2024-04-15

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 902724698X

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This book presents the first in-depth investigation of modality in Galician linguistics, offering a theoretical discussion of modal categories and a fine-grained description of epistemic adverbs. The first half of the monograph deconstructs the most relevant approaches to modal categories and shows how the traditional concept of modality is a problematic notion, how it relates to other concepts such as evidentiality and mitigation, and how it ought to be conceived of in order to become a more useful instrument for linguistic analysis. A new way of understanding modality is explored and illustrated through Galician examples. The second half of the book zooms in on six epistemic adverbs, which are exhaustively studied from both a formal and a functional perspective. Combining a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, the book shows that adverbs make up a rich semantic scale and establishes several factors that condition their occurrence in discourse, challenging previous conceptions of this grammatical domain.

Evidentials and Relevance
Evidentials and Relevance

Author: Elly Ifantidou

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9781588110329

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This book uses Sperber and Wilson s Relevance Theory to show how evidential expressions can be analysed in a unified semantic/pragmatic framework. The first part surveys general linguistic work on evidentials, presents speech-act theory and examines Grice s theory of meaning and communication with emphasis on three main issues: for linguistically encoded evidentials, are they truth-conditional or non-truth-conditional, and do they contribute to explicit or implicit communication? For pragmatically inferred evidentials, is there a pragmatic framework in which they can be adequately accounted for? The second part examines those assumptions of Relevance theory that bear on the study of evidentials, offers an account of pragmatically inferred evidentials and introduces three distinctions relevant to the issues discussed in this book: between explicit and implicit communication, truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning, and conceptual and procedural meaning. These distinctions are applied to a variety of linguistically encoded evidentials, including sentence adverbials, parenthetical constructions and hearsay particles. This book offers convincing evidence that not all evidentials behave similarly with respect to the above distinctions and offers an explanation for why this is so.

Revisiting Aspect and Aktionsart
Revisiting Aspect and Aktionsart

Author: Francis G. H. Pang

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-02-02

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 9004310886

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In Revisiting Aspect and Aktionsart, Francis G.H. Pang employs a corpus approach to analyze the relationship between Greek aspect and Aktionsart. Recent works have tried to predict the meanings that emerge when a certain set of clausal factors and lexical features combine with one of the grammatical aspects. Most of these works rely heavily on Zeno Vendler's telicity distinction. Based on empirical evidence, Pang argues that telicity and perfectivity are not related in a systematic manner in Koine Greek. As a corollary, Aktionsart should be considered an interpretive category, meaning that its different values emerge, not from the interaction of only one or two linguistic parameters, but from the process of interpreting language in context.

Metarepresentation
Metarepresentation

Author: Eun-Ju Noh

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9789027250841

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Eun-Ju Noh's book provides a close look at linguistic metarepresentation showing how beliefs, utterances, and propositions are represented and how they are inferred. The author explains how metarepresentation works in various types of uses: quotations, negation, echo questions, and conditionals in terms of truth conditions and pragmatic enrichment. Ample examples are provided from the English language. The relevance-theory approach gives room for extralinguistic parameters to be considered, and suggestions are made for further research in cross-linguistic studies and metarepresentation.

The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics
The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics

Author: Keith Allan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-01-12

Total Pages: 967

ISBN-13: 1139501895

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Pragmatics is the study of human communication: the choices speakers make to express their intended meaning and the kinds of inferences that hearers draw from an utterance in the context of its use. This Handbook surveys pragmatics from different perspectives, presenting the main theories in pragmatic research, incorporating seminal research as well as cutting-edge solutions. It addresses questions of rational and empirical research methods, what counts as an adequate and successful pragmatic theory, and how to go about answering problems raised in pragmatic theory. In the fast-developing field of pragmatics, this Handbook fills the gap in the market for a one-stop resource to the wide scope of today's research and the intricacy of the many theoretical debates. It is an authoritative guide for graduate students and researchers with its focus on the areas and theories that will mark progress in pragmatic research in the future.

Relevance, Pragmatics and Interpretation
Relevance, Pragmatics and Interpretation

Author: Kate Scott

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-07-18

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1108418635

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Showcases recent research by leading scholars working within the relevance-theoretic pragmatics framework.

Parentheticals
Parentheticals

Author: Nicole Dehé

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9789027233707

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This volume offers a unique collection of articles investigating the often neglected phenomenon of parentheticals, which are commonly seen as expressions interrupting the linear structure of a host utterance, but lacking a structural relation to it. The book provides an up-to-date introduction to the subject, as well as a range of research articles addressing questions including the syntactic link between parenthetical and frame utterance, the relation between syntactic and prosodic form, the usage and interpretation of parentheticals, and many more. It embraces research findings from different European languages (English, German, Dutch, Romance) and covers an array of forms of syntactic interpolations (from one-word parentheticals to clausal) and a range of methodologies, including empirical research, corpus research, and theoretical analyses. The collection underlines the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to a multi-faceted phenomenon such as parentheticals.