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12 - Alternatives

from Part VI - Determining and Questioning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2022

By
Matthijs Westera
Edited by
Daniel Altshuler
Daniel Altshuler
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

The notion of ’alternative’ is central to analyses of various semantic/pragmatic phenomena, such as disjunction, focus, discourse structure, questions, and implicature. However, basic questions concerning the various notions of alternatives have not received the attention they deserve, e.g. what exactly these notions signify, or how they are supposed to interact. This chapter reflects on such questions, centering on appeals to alternatives in characterizations of focus, disjunction, discourse goals (questions under discussion), and interrogatives. More precisely, this chapter criticizes the conflation of the set of focus alternatives with the meaning of an interrogative, discusses two conceptions of the alternatives introduced by disjunction (algebraic and attention-based), and departs from the predominant view of QUDs as, essentially, linguistic questions that represent discourse goals.

Keywords

alternativequestion under discussionfocusdisjunctioninterrogative
Type
Chapter
Information
Linguistics Meets Philosophy , pp. 358 - 380
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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