Revisiting Sentence Adverbials and Relevance
Author
e-Book – Ordering information
ISBN 9789027252838 | EUR 95.00
| USD 143.00
This book offers a fresh take on several long-standing issues relating to the (non-)truth-conditional interpretation of epistemic, evidential, hearsay and epistemic 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. Drawing on 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.
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 334] Expected June 2023. vii, 250 pp. + index
Publishing status: In production
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
-
Acknowledgements | p. vii
-
Chapter 1. Introduction | pp. 1–13
-
Chapter 2. Relevance theory | pp. 14–55
-
Chapter 3. Sentence adverbials in relevance theory | pp. 56–87
-
Chapter 4. Towards an alternative relevance-theoretic account of attitudinal, evidential, hearsay and epistemic adverbials | pp. 88–132
-
Chapter 5. Adverbial syntax and (non-)truth-conditionality | pp. 133–153
-
Chapter 6. Syntax and beyond: Explaining (non-)truth-conditional interpretations | pp. 154–227
-
Chapter 7. Conclusion | pp. 228–234
-
Bibliography | pp. 235–250
Subjects & Metadata
BIC Subject: CFG – Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis
BISAC Subject: LAN009030 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Pragmatics