1887
Volume 17, Issue 2
  • ISSN 0929-0907
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9943
USD
Buy:$35.00 + Taxes

Abstract

It is argued that genuinely subsentential phrases, such as a discourse-initial utterance of “From France” to indicate the provenance of an item, provide evidence for the reality of the pragmatic process of free enrichment. I consider recent attempts to treat such discourse-initial fragments as linguistic ellipsis of some kind while accommodating the difference between these cases and accepted types of ellipsis such as sluicing and gapping (for example Merchant 2007a,b). I claim that the mechanisms they posit to save an ellipsis story have no role in an account of performance (an account of the processes of utterance interpretation). An argument against the enrichment approach from the indeterminacy of the content of subsentential utterances is discussed, and refuted, and it is shown how this indeterminacy is accommodated in a contextualist pragmatic theory.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/pc.17.2.02hal
2009-01-01
2025-04-30
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/pc.17.2.02hal
Loading
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was successful
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error