Implicatures in Discourse

The case of Spanish NP anaphora

Sarah E. Blackwell | University of Georgia

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027253453 (Eur) | EUR 115.00

ISBN 9781588112798 (USA) | USD 173.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027296894 | EUR 115.00 | USD 173.00

Implicatures in Discourse examines Spanish conversations and oral narratives in order to seek support for a pragmatic theory of anaphora. Blackwell argues that the use of anaphoric expressions may be considered conversational implicatures that give rise to inferences of coreference and non-coreference. Her analysis shows how speakers abide by Levinson's 'neo-Gricean' principles of Quantity, Informativeness, and Manner, but that grammatical, semantic, cognitive, and pragmatic constraints interact with the neo-Gricean principles, influencing anaphora use and interpretation. The study also reveals how mutual knowledge, including familiarity with Spanish social and cultural norms, enables interlocutors to use and comprehend minimal referring expressions, which cultural outsiders may not be able to interpret. While drawing on earlier work on anaphora and reference, this book offers a fresh look at discourse anaphora, and sheds light on the ways in which speakers felicitously use and interpret anaphoric expressions in a variety of communicative contexts.

[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 105] 2003. xvi, 303 pp.

Publishing status: Available
Published online on 21 October 2008

https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.105

Table of Contents

List of abbreviations used in glosses | p. xi

Preface | p. xiii

1. Introduction | pp. 1–9

2. The neo-Gricean pragmatic approach to anaphora | pp. 11–49

3. Social, functional, and cognitive approaches to reference | pp. 51–95

4. NP anaphora in Spanish conversation | pp. 97–173

5. Referring expressions in Spanish narrative discourse | pp. 175–249

6. Conclusions | pp. 251–259

Notes | pp. 261–271

Appendix: Transcription conventions | pp. 285–286

Author Index | pp. 287–289

Subject Index | pp. 291–297

“Blackwell's contribution is very clearly a milestone in the analysis of coreference in Spanish, and a study that will most certainly prove itself very influential in years to come.”

Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach, The Ohio State University, in Studies in Language Vol. 30:1 (2006)

“The book, with its Spanish conversation and narrative discourse examples so carefully described about anaphora, represents an invaluable gift because they are naturally occurring. It is an outstanding contribution to the study of anaphora, as a step forward, and shows clearly that many other factors play a role in the selection of the best anaphoric form in a given environment. [...] the book also provides a good overview of previous approaches to anaphora. [...] the book nicely presents research that is useful for graduate and postgraduate students as a companion text in any linguistic or computational linguistic course. The overall impression is that the book is well designed, well written and easy to read. Blackwell's linguistic research is entirely professional and her book can be recommended to anyone interested in the subject. The book could be used both as a reference for its empirical results, and as a source of inspiration for further study.”

Raúl Morales Carrasco, Puebla Institute of Technology (ITPue), México, on Linguist List 16-113 (2005)

“[...] the book provides a clear and well-organized presentation of nonsyntactic aspects of anaphora and meticulous discussions of Spanish corpus data, and thus valuable reading for both Hispanicists and general linguists.”

Andreas Dufter, University of Munich, Germany in Language, Vol. 80:4 (2004)

Cited by (8)

Cited by eight other publications

Order by:

Limerick, Philip P.

2019. The discursive distribution of subject pronouns in Spanish spoken in Georgia: A weakening of pragmatic constraints?. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 12:1 ► pp. 97 ff.

Blackwell, Sarah E.

2018. Frames of Reference and Antecedentless Anaphora in Spanish Conversation. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 47:2 ► pp. 283 ff.

Rinke, Esther & Cristina Flores

2018. Another look at the interpretation of overt and null pronominal subjects in bilingual language acquisition: Heritage Portuguese in contact with German and Spanish. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3:1

Clements, Maria & Laura Domínguez

2017. Reexamining the acquisition of null subject pronouns in a second language. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 7:1 ► pp. 33 ff.

Chiou, Michael

2013. Performing Anaphora in Modern Greek: A Neo-Gricean Pragmatic Analysis. Research in Language 11:3 ► pp. 335 ff.

Recasens, Marta & M. Antònia Martí

2010. AnCora-CO: Coreferentially annotated corpora for Spanish and Catalan. Language Resources and Evaluation 44:4 ► pp. 315 ff.

[no author supplied]

2014. Profiling Discourse Participants [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 246],

[no author supplied]

2016. Third Person References [Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, 71],

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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