Revisiting Sentence Adverbials and Relevance
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Authors
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 language | English |
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Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company |
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Number of pages | 254 |
ISBN (print) | 9789027213730 |
ISBN (electronic) | 9789027252838 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2023 |
Publication series
Name | Pragmatics and Beyond New Series |
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Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company |
Volume | 334 |
ISSN (Print) | 0922-842X |
Bibliographical note
Dissertation, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, 2021
- Didactics of English as a foreign language
- English