Abstract
In this article I discuss one of the linguistic means which enables speakers to represent content in their utterances without expressing it explicitly. I will argue, in line with Wilson and Sperber, that the logical form of the argument encoded by an utterance (however fragmentarily or incompletely) is sufficient as a cue directing the hearers to the implicit content of the speaker's meaning. I will suggest that the logical form of the encoded argument enables the speaker to represent in the utterance certain contextual implicatures as a hidden layer of the text. I will illustrate this by showing how these means are used for embedding contextual implicatures by analyzing a text of an Israeli court file. This analysis can be easily generalized to other legal systems and argumentative texts.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 728-743 |
Number of pages | 16 |
Journal | Journal of Pragmatics |
Volume | 42 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 2010 |
Keywords
- Common ground
- Comprehension procedure
- Contextual implicatures
- Expectations
- Logical form
- Relevance
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Language and Linguistics
- Linguistics and Language
- Artificial Intelligence