Like: The Discourse Particle and Semantics  

Oleh:

Siegel, Muffy E. A.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Semantics (Sebagian Full Text) vol. 19 no. 1 (Feb. 2002), page 35-71.
Topik: Discourse; Grammars;
Fulltext: vol 19, no 1, p 35-71.pdf (197.94KB)

Isi artikel

Using data from interviews with high school students, I first adduce evidence that lends support to Schourup's (1985) claim that the United States English adolescent hedge like is a discourse particle signalling a possible slight mismatch between words and meaning. Such a particle would generally be included in a grammar in a post-compositional pragmatic component, but, surprisingly, like also affects basic semantic attributes. These include both truth-conditions and the weak/strong distinction—though only in existential there and sluicing sentences. I argue that the differential behaviour of like in various constructions selecting weak NP's stems from the restricted free variable it introduces, a variable which only there and sluicing require. This variable is available for binding, quantifier interpretation and other syntactic-semantic processes, yet is pragmatically conditioned. Indeed, I show that, due to its formal properties, like can be interpreted only during the assignment of model-theoretic denotations to expressions, along the lines of Lasersohn's (1999) pragmatic haloes. These results support the idea that weak/strong is not a unitary distinction and suggest that the various components of grammars must be organized to allow information from pragmatic/discourse elements to affect basic compositional semantics.

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