Indeterminacy, inference, iconicity and interpretation: Aspects of the grammar-pragmatics interface
Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: Every utterance is processed both grammatically and pragmatically. Accordingly, in offering an account of linguistic phenomena, the burden of explanation may be on the grammar or on the pragmatics; and if on the grammar, the account may invoke one sub-module or another. We describe a number of examples where the overall theory is simplified if the account is switched from one (sub)module to another. Our main example concerns topic and focus fronting, where we claim that there are no dedicated Topic and Focus heads; rather, two semantically trivial heads, Gap and Φον, can be exploited to front phrases which may be pragmatically interpreted as topic or focus.
Authors: Smith, Neil, Cormack, Annabel
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2949975279