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Part of
Pragmatics and Literature
Edited by Siobhan Chapman and Billy Clark
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 35] 2019
► pp. 139–164

Chapter 7
“Lazy reading” and “half-formed things”

Indeterminacy and responses to Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

Article outline
  • 7.1Introduction
  • 7.2 A Girl is a Half-formed Thing
  • 7.3Pragmatics and indeterminacy
    • 7.3.1Explicatures and implicatures
    • 7.3.2Open-endedness and spontaneousness
    • 7.3.3“Manifestness”
  • 7.4“Lazy” readings and other responses
  • 7.5Accounting for varying responses
    • 7.5.1Explicit content
    • 7.5.2Implicatures
    • 7.5.3Spontaneousness
    • 7.5.4Open-endedness
    • 7.5.5Characterising readers and readings
  • 7.6Summary
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 December 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.35.07cla
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