Something out of nothing? Rethinking unarticulated constituents  

Oleh:

Vicente, Begonna ; Groefsema, Marjolein

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Pragmatics: An Interdiciplinary Journal of Language Studies vol. 45 no. 1 (2013), page 108-127.
Topik: Unarticulated constituent; Free enrichment; Covert indexical; Implicit arguments; Subsentential utterances; Optional modification
Fulltext: Vicente_B.pdf (592.88KB)

Isi artikel

In this paper we look into the notion of unarticulated constituent (UC) as characterised by Relevance theorists and the philosopher Francois Recanati. We show that postulating that constituents are added to the proposition expressed subject only to pragmatic restrictions, as they do, makes empirically wrong predictions and leaves a number of interpretation phenomena unexplained. We argue that the need for UCs arises inevitably for pragmatic approaches that subscribe to the thesis of the underdeterminacy of linguistic content -- as we do --, but which view the syntax of the surface sequence as the only source of structural complexity. We defend an alternative view of how language articulates content and how it interacts with context which combines insights from both Conceptual Semantics and Dynamic Syntax which can accommodate the recovery of unpronounced constituents of the proposition expressed in terms of constraints on the construction of logical/conceptual representations along the same lines as the recovery of any content derived from overt linguistic input. We focus our discussion on three alleged major sources of UCs: implicit arguments, subsentential utterances and optional modification.

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