Abstract
Although it is widely acknowledged that context influences a variety of pragmatic phenomena, it is not clear how best to articulate this notion of context and thereby explain the nature of its influence. In this paper, we target contextual alternatives that are evoked via focus placement and test how the same contextual manipulation can influence three different phenomena that involve pragmatic enrichment: scalar implicature, presupposition, and coreference. We argue that focus placement influences these three phenomena indirectly by providing the listener with information about the likely question under discussion (QUD) that a particular utterance answers (Roberts, 1996/2012). In three listening experiments, we find that the predicted interpretations are indeed made more available when focus placement is added to the final element (to the scalar adjective, to an entity embedded under the negated presupposition trigger, and to the predicate of a pronoun). These findings bring together several distinct strands of work on the effect of focus placement on interpretation all in the domain of pragmatic enrichment. Together they advance our empirical understanding of the relation between focus placement and QUD and highlight commonalities between implicature, presupposition, and coreference.
Highlights
The study of pragmatics examines how hearers infer meaning beyond that which is explicitly expressed by the speaker
The three experiments reported here test how a manipulation of focus placement can influence three phenomena that involve pragmatic enrichment, all of which are sensitive to the question under discussion (QUD) evoked by the context
Unlike previous work that has explicitly manipulated the previous context, here it is the focus placement itself that informs the listener about the possible QUD to which the current sentence may be an answer
Summary
The study of pragmatics examines how hearers infer meaning beyond that which is explicitly expressed by the speaker. This process crucially depends upon the consideration of what is not said as well as what is said. To take one much-discussed example, quantity implicature has traditionally been assumed to rely on the hearer’s ability to identify and reason about more informative alternatives that the speaker could have uttered. As Grice (1975) sketched out, we expect that cooperative speakers will adhere to several principles of interaction. They will not make statements which are false or for which
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