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A Formal Treatment of the Pragmatics of Questions and Attitudes*

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Abstract

This article discusses pragmatic aspects of our interpretation of intensional constructions like questions and prepositional attitude reports. In the first part, it argues that our evaluation of these constructions may vary relative to the identification methods operative in the context of use. This insight is then given a precise formalization in a possible world semantics. In the second part, an account of actual evaluations of questions and attitudes is proposed in the framework of bi-directional optimality theory. Pragmatic meaning selections are explained as the result of specific rankings of potentially conflicting generation and interpretation constraints.

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Authors
  1. Maria Aloni
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Additional information

This material has grown out of chapters 1, 2 and 4 of my PhD thesis ‘Quantification under Conceptual Covers’. I would like to thank my supervisors Jeroen Groenendijk and Paul Dekker, and the organizers and participants of the Amsterdam workshops “Questions under Discussion” and “Communication and Attitudes” for having inspired part of that work. Furthermore I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer, and to the audiences of TARK 2001, the 13th Amsterdam Colloquium, the Semantics Colloquium Nijmegen and the workshop (“Pragmatics in Bi-directional Optimality Theory” (ESSLLI 2002) for insightful comments on previous versions of this article. Part of this research has been financially supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

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Aloni, M. A Formal Treatment of the Pragmatics of Questions and Attitudes*. Linguist Philos 28, 505–539 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-005-1160-4

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