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Building Categories in Interaction: Linguistic resources at work
Edited by Caterina Mauri, Ilaria Fiorentini and Eugenio Goria
[Studies in Language Companion Series 220] 2021
► pp. 187–210

Chapter 7
Making the implicit explicit

Free enrichment in interaction

| Free University Berlin

Semantic underdeterminacy in the form of unformulated syntactic slots is a widely-discussed research theme, even though opinions differ about whether the interpretation is a result of pragmatic processes of free enrichment (e.g., Carston 2004; Recanati 2002, 2004; Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995) or of obligatory processes of the linguistic structure (Stanley 2007). Using a conversation analytic approach, a corpus of narrative interviews can show that interlocutors use a wide range of turns to deal with these forms of semantic underdeterminacy. In narrative interviews, prototypically the communicative functions of these turns (e.g. repair, gaining time or developing the topic) are in relation to the accessibility of possible candidates within the given context. The empirical findings support the relevance theory account of free enrichment.

Keywords: semantic underdeterminacy, free enrichment, relevance theory, implicit-explicit communication, narrative interviews, retrospective utterance, communicative function, other-initiated repair, gaining time, developing the topic
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Relevance theoretical perspective
    • 2.1The conversational analytic perspective: Other-initiated repair
  • 3.Method and data
    • 3.1Narrative interviews: The corpus of the fall of the wall
    • 3.2Data
  • 4.Empirical analysis
    • 4.1The implicit source term linguistically
    • 4.2Possible meanings: Candidates and utterance formats
    • 4.3The communicative function of elaborating implicit syntactic slots
      • 4.3.1Presenting accessible candidates with strategic function
      • 4.3.2Realizing repair in the case of two or a restricted set of possible candidates
      • 4.3.3Endless possible candidates or no candidate accessible
  • 5.Summary
  • 6.Transcript conventions GAT II(Selting et al. 2009, selection)
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.220.07pau
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