Revisiting Sentence Adverbials and Relevance
Author
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.
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 334] 2023. ix, 254 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
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Acknowledgements | pp. ix–x
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Chapter 1. Introduction | pp. 1–12
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Chapter 2. Relevance theory | pp. 13–54
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Chapter 3. Sentence adverbials in relevance theory | pp. 55–86
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Chapter 4. An alternative relevance-theoretic account of attitudinal, evidential, hearsay and epistemic adverbials | pp. 87–131
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Chapter 5. Adverbial syntax and (non-)truth-conditionality | pp. 132–152
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Chapter 6. Syntax and beyond: Explaining (non-)truth-conditional interpretations | pp. 153–225
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Chapter 7. Conclusion | pp. 226–232
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Bibliography | pp. 233–248
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Name index | pp. 249–250
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Subject index | pp. 251–254
Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CFG: Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009030: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Pragmatics
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number: 2023001700