Revisiting Sentence Adverbials and Relevance

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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.
Original languageEnglish
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company
Number of pages254
ISBN (print)9789027213730
ISBN (electronic)9789027252838
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

Publication series

NamePragmatics and Beyond New Series
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company
Volume334
ISSN (Print)0922-842X

Bibliographical note

Dissertation, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, 2021

DOI