Last update:
9 February 2010
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Implicatures in DiscourseThe case of Spanish NP anaphora
2003. xvi, 303 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Hardbound
– In stock
978 90 272 5345 3 / EUR 115.00 978 1 58811 279 8 / USD 173.00
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– Available from e-book platforms
Implicatures in Discourse examines Spanish conversations and oral narratives in order to seek support for a pragmatic theory of anaphora. Blackwell argues that the use of anaphoric expressions may be considered conversational implicatures that give rise to inferences of coreference and non-coreference. Her analysis shows how speakers abide by Levinson's 'neo-Gricean' principles of Quantity, Informativeness, and Manner, but that grammatical, semantic, cognitive, and pragmatic constraints interact with the neo-Gricean principles, influencing anaphora use and interpretation. The study also reveals how mutual knowledge, including familiarity with Spanish social and cultural norms, enables interlocutors to use and comprehend minimal referring expressions, which cultural outsiders may not be able to interpret. While drawing on earlier work on anaphora and reference, this book offers a fresh look at discourse anaphora, and sheds light on the ways in which speakers felicitously use and interpret anaphoric expressions in a variety of communicative contexts.
Table of contents
“[...] the book provides a clear and well-organized presentation of nonsyntactic aspects of anaphora and meticulous discussions of Spanish corpus data, and thus valuable reading for both Hispanicists and general linguists.”
Andreas Dufter, University of Munich, Germany in Language, Vol. 80:4 (2004)
“The book, with its Spanish conversation and narrative discourse examples so carefully described about anaphora, represents an invaluable gift because they are naturally occurring. It is an outstanding contribution to the study of anaphora, as a step forward, and shows clearly that many other factors paly a role in the selection of the best anaphoric form in a given environment. [...] the book also provides a good overview of previous approaches to anaphora. [...] the book nicely presents research that is useful or graduate and postgraduate students as a companion text in any linguistic or computational linguistic course. The overall impression is that the book is well designed, well written and easy to read. Blackwell's linguistic research is entirely professional and her book can be recommended to anyone interested in the subject. The book could be used both as a reference for its emperical results, and as a source of inspiration for further study.”
“Blackwell's contribution is very clearly a milestone in the analysis of coreference in Spanish, and a study that will most certainly prove itself very influential in years to come.”
Subject classification |
Linguistics