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 |
|---|---|
| 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