Local Pragmatics Redux: Presupposition Accommodation and Non-Redundancy Without Covert Operators
Keny Chatain, Philippe Schlenker
March 2023
 

On several occasions in recent linguistic research, operations that used to be considered part of pragmatics were syntacticized: a covert operator was postulated to enrich the meaning of some constituents as part of compositional semantics. Three cases in point are Chierchia, Fox and Spector's exhaustivity operator O, used to compute local implicatures; Bochvar's assertation operator A, used to compute local accommodation of presuppositions; and more recently, Blumberg and Goldstein's non-redundancy operator R, used to capture cases of intrusion of non-redundancy conditions in the truth conditions. A key benefit of syntacticization is to explain why these operations can be performed in the scope of various operators, something that is not easy to conceptualize within standard Gricean pragmatics. But are these operators syntactically real? We develop tests based on ellipsis and argue that the answer is negative for Bochvar's A as applied to presupposition accommodation, and for Blumberg and Goldstein's R applied to non-redundancy. In the spirit of Recanati's 'free enrichment', we develop an alternative analysis of presupposition accommodation. It is based on a generalization of domain restriction, which we take to apply not just to nominal elements but, when needed, to verbal elements as well. We further argue that some of Blumberg and Goldstein's non-redundancy conditions can be analyzed within a generalization of accommodation theory and can thus be reduced (operator-free) to the preceding case. Besides these results, our analysis raises more general questions: Which pragmatic operators are syntactically real and which are not? And what should be inferred from this typology about the architecture of the semantics/pragmatics interface?
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/007095
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keywords: semantics, pragmatics, operators, semantics/pragmatics interface, local implicatures, local accommodation, non-redundancy, semantics, syntax
previous versions: v2 [February 2023]
v1 [January 2023]
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