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Constraining Explicit and Implicit Content by Means of a Norwegian Scalar Particle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2008

Thorstein Fretheim
Thorstein Fretheim
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Trondheim (NTNU), N-7491 Trondheim, Norway. E-mail: thorstein.fretheim@hf.ntnu.no
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Abstract

This study is a semantic and pragmatic analysis of the Norwegian right-detached particle så, which occurs exclusively with sentence fragments. The framework of description is relevance theory, a cognitively based theory of communication whose objective is to account for how we are able to understand utterances and to make ourselves understood, in spite of the fact that the linguistic code that we use vastly underdetermines what we mean, and even what we say in the strict sense (truth conditions). It is argued that så encodes a procedure for the addressee to follow in his inferential processing of the linguistic signal. The lexical entry for så contains an instruction to the addressee to contextually activate one or more positive propositions which resemble the one asserted by the utterance of the så-fragment, and to arrange them mentally on a scale whose lower bound is represented by the så-fragment proposition. The speaker implicitly communicates her lack of commitment to the more highly ranked propositions on the scale. The principle behind the scalar ranking is argued to be highly context-dependent.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , December 2000 , pp. 115 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

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