Attentive pragmatics: an account of exhaustivity and the final rise. Westera, M. Proceedings of the ESSLLI student session, 2013.
Attentive pragmatics: an account of exhaustivity and the final rise [pdf]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
I present a unifying solution to two well-known empirical puzzles: (i) how to account for the exhaustive interpretation of answers, and (ii) how to account for the semantics of the final rise in American English. It relies on the hypotheses that pragmatic reasoning is sensitive to the possibilities that a sentence draws attention to and that the final rise conveys the speaker's uncertain cooperativity. The take-home message is that the Gricean approach to exhaustivity is viable, provided that we enrich the underlying semantics with attentive content.

Downloads: 0