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| Title: | PROPOSITIONAL UNDERDETERMINACY IN A GRAMMATICAL CONSTRUCTION IN TIGRINYA |
| Authors: | Keffyalew, Gebreslassie |
| Copyright: | 2008 |
| Date Added: | 24-Sep-2008 |
| Publisher: | Addis Ababa University |
| Abstract: | One important consequence of the Relevance Theoretic view of
cognition and communication is that we can communicate many
thoughts that our utterances do not encode as we can think many
thoughts that our language can not encode (Sperber and Wilson
2002, Carston 1998, Recanati 1993, among many others). In line
with this, the Tigrinya data in this paper showed that virtually no
sentence encodes a complete thought as there is almost always a
discrepancy with what we said and what we mean (Levinson
2000). At the same time the paper made a strong essentialist view
of propositional Underdeterminacy. That is, in Tigrinya what is
said (the proposition expressed) by an utterance is inevitably not
fully determined by the meaning of the linguistic expression or
grammatical construction used to convey it.
The findings of this short paper deviate from the
traditional Gricean view that pragmatically determined aspects of
utterance interpretation like enrichment processes have
implicatures and not explicatures as their target. However, it
supports the arguments of Sperber and Wilson (2002), Carston
(1998), and Recanati (1993); though these scholars do differ in
their proposals on how the semantic/linguistic interpretations of a
speaker’s utterance is “fleshed out” or “enriched” to form our
understanding of what is said. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/1351 |
| Appears in: | ILS Proceedings - The 19th Annual Conference
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