Michael Dummett has nicely expressed a rather widespread doctrine about the primacy of sentences. He writes: "you cannot DO anything with a word — cannot effect any conventional (linguistic) act by uttering it — save by uttering some sentence containing that word ...". In this paper we argue that this doctrine is mistaken: it is not only sentences, but also ordinary words and phrases which can be used in isolation. The argument involves two steps. First: we show — using Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory — that an utterance of "John's father" could COMMUNICATE a proposition. Second: we point out that, in this context, this proposition would be asserted rather than merely implicated. Because there is nothing importantly idiosyncratic about the phrase "John's father", we infer that words and phrases generally can be used in isolation to make assertions.
2005. Knowledge by Acquaintance and Meaning in Isolation. In Ellipsis and Nonsentential Speech, ► pp. 165 ff.
Bum-Sik Park
2013. Multiple fragment answers in Korean. Linguistic Research 30:3 ► pp. 453 ff.
Bum-Sik Park
2015. Ways of Deriving Bare Fragments: Case-stranding and Postposition-stranding under Ellipsis. Studies in Generative Grammar 25:4 ► pp. 825 ff.
Bum-Sik Park & Sei-Rang Oh
2016. Left Branch Extraction in Multiple Fragments and Its Implications for Island Violations in Korean. Korean Journal of Linguistics 41:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Capone, Alessando
2010. What Can Modularity of Mind Tell Us about the Semantics/Pragmatics Debate?. Australian Journal of Linguistics 30:4 ► pp. 497 ff.
Capone, Alessandro
2009. Are explicatures cancellable? Toward a theory of the speaker's intentionality. Intercultural Pragmatics 6:1
Capone, Alessandro
2010. “Between Scylla and Charybdis”: The semantics and pragmatics of attitudes ‘de se’. Intercultural Pragmatics 7:3
Capone, Alessandro
2016. The Semantics and Pragmatics of Attitudes ‘de se’. In The Pragmatics of Indirect Reports [Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 8], ► pp. 227 ff.
Capone, Alessandro
2019. On the Nature of Pragmatic Increments at the Truth-Conditional Level. In Pragmatics and Philosophy. Connections and Ramifications [Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 22], ► pp. 47 ff.
Chevalier, Fabienne H. G.
2008. Unfinished Turns in French Conversation: How Context Matters. Research on Language & Social Interaction 41:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Clapp, Lenny
2005. On the Interpretation and Performance of Non-Sentential Assertions. In Ellipsis and Nonsentential Speech, ► pp. 109 ff.
Clift, Rebecca
2005. Discovering order. Lingua 115:11 ► pp. 1641 ff.
Cruz, Begoña Vicente
2010. The Role of Pragmatic Inferencing in Compositional Semantics. In Explicit Communication, ► pp. 58 ff.
Elugardo, Reinaldo & Robert J. Stainton
2004. Shorthand, Syntactic Ellipsis, and the Pragmatic Determinants of What Is Said. Mind & Language 19:4 ► pp. 442 ff.
Filcheva, Krasimira
2023. Can there be a feature‐placing language?. European Journal of Philosophy 31:3 ► pp. 655 ff.
Frápolli, María José
2013. Syntax: Playing with Building Blocks. In The Nature of Truth, ► pp. 21 ff.
Frápolli, María José
2013. What Do You Mean by “Redundancy”?. In The Nature of Truth, ► pp. 111 ff.
Gross, Steven
2005. Context‐Sensitive Truth‐Theoretic Accounts of Semantic Competence. Mind & Language 20:1 ► pp. 68 ff.
Hall, Alison
2007. Do discourse connectives encode concepts or procedures?. Lingua 117:1 ► pp. 149 ff.
HALL, ALISON
2008. Free Enrichment or Hidden Indexicals?. Mind & Language 23:4 ► pp. 426 ff.
Hee-Don Ahn & 조성은
2017. A Bi-clausal Analysis of Multiple Fragments. Studies in Generative Grammar 27:1 ► pp. 197 ff.
Johnson, Michael
2020. Compositionality. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics, ► pp. 1 ff.
Kenyon, Tim
2005. Non-Sentences, Implicature, and Success in Communication. In Ellipsis and Nonsentential Speech, ► pp. 131 ff.
Romero, Esther & Belén Soria
2010. Phrasal Pragmatics in Robyn Carston’s Programme. In Explicit Communication, ► pp. 183 ff.
Stainton, Robert J.
1995. Non-sentential assertions and semantic ellipsis. Linguistics and Philosophy 18:3 ► pp. 281 ff.
Sungbom Lee & 홍승진
2009. Functions of Elliptical Utterances: A Pragmatic Analysis. Discourse and Cognition 16:1 ► pp. 63 ff.
Unger, Christoph
2012. Procedural semantics, metarepresentation, and some particles in Behdini Kurdish. Lingua 122:14 ► pp. 1613 ff.
Vicente, Begoña & Marjolein Groefsema
2013. Something out of nothing? Rethinking unarticulated constituents. Journal of Pragmatics 47:1 ► pp. 108 ff.
Wilson, Peter
2003. Ellipsis. In Handbook of Pragmatics, ► pp. 1 ff.
Yus Ramos, Francisco
1998. A decade of relevance theory. Journal of Pragmatics 30:3 ► pp. 305 ff.
박범식
2008. Fragments and Ellipsis in Korean. Studies in Generative Grammar 18:1 ► pp. 13 ff.
[no author supplied]
2002. References. In Thoughts and Utterances, ► pp. 384 ff.
[no author supplied]
2006. Bibliography. In The Handbook of Pragmatics, ► pp. 742 ff.
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