Publications
Publication details [#50787]
Garrett, Merrill F. and Robert Harnish. 2009. Skating along the syntactic verge: Experimental pragmatics and understood elements of content. In Farrar, Scott, William D. Lewis and Heidi Harley, eds. Time and Again. Theoretical perspectives on formal linguistics. In honor of D. Terence Langendoen. (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 135). John Benjamins. pp. 55–89.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Annotation
This paper discusses elements of communicative content that are not expressed by overt elements of a sentence. In the 1970s and 1980s, mostly inspired by the work of Grice, forms of ‘unexpressed elements of content’ not contemplated by linguistic theory of the time began to surface under a variety of labels, collectively called ‘impliciture’ here. It is argued in this paper that recent experimental work suggests that certain forms of impliciture are tied to language via “standardization” which provides a pragmatic scenario that does not require access to potentially unbounded domains of general background information.