Journal ArticleDOI
Presupposition and linguistic context
TLDR
A recursive definition of "satisfaction of presupposition" is proposed that makes it unnecessary to have any explicit method for assigning presuppositions to compound sentences.Abstract:
According to a pragmatic view, the presuppositions of a sentence detrmine the class of contexts in which the sentence could be felicitously uttered. Complex sentences present a difficult problem in this framework. No simple \"projection method\" has been found by which we could compute their presuppositions from those of their constituent clauses. This paper presents a way to eliminate the projection problem. A recursive definition of \"satisfaction of presuppositions\" is proposed that makes it unnecessary to have any explicit method for assigning presuppositions to compound sentences. A theory of presuppositions becomes a theory of contraints on successive contexts in a fully explicit discourse.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Adverbs in VP ellipsis: an experimental investigation of antecedent selection
TL;DR: It is shown experimentally that there is a preference for resolving ellipses in certain embedded clauses with unmodified VPs, hypothesized to reflect a general requirement to minimize the complexity of accommodated content.
Prolegomena to a Semantic Theory for Natural Languages Based on Recursive Artihmetic
TL;DR: In this article, the possibility of employing a primitive recursive arithm to build the semantic representations of natural language sentences is explored, and several linguistic phenomena, attested in natural languages of different families, can be explained in an especially natural way by assuming that the lexical elements and syn- tactic structures involved are correlated with the presence of these free variables with generic value in the logical form of the sentence.
Journal ArticleDOI
Communicating with silent addressees: Engagement features in legal opening statements
TL;DR: This paper present an empirical study of explicit features of audience orientation, investigating how lawyers transform overhearing observers into active participants, and reveal how perceptions of the audience influence discursive choices, thereby attesting to the centrality of relational work in legal communication.
Journal ArticleDOI
Reporting Someone Else's Speech: The Use of the Optative and Accusative-and-Infinitive as Reportative Markers in Herodotus' Histories
TL;DR: This paper provided a pragmatic account of the oblique optative and accusative-and-infinitive constructions in Ancient Greek, and used this analysis to explain the usefulness of the constructions.