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4 - Evidential Explicatures and Mismatch Resolution

from Part I - Relevance Theory and Cognitive Communicative Issues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2019

Kate Scott
Affiliation:
Kingston University, London
Billy Clark
Affiliation:
Northumbria University, Newcastle
Robyn Carston
Affiliation:
University College London
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Summary

The chapter addresses the concept of ‘explicature’, a notion which has been central to relevance theory from its inception and which introduced a radically new way of thinking about explicitly communicated meaning and about the semantics–pragmatics distinction. Victoria Escandell-Vidal focuses here on how utterances of particular expressions in Spanish (some occurrences of the verb estar and some uses of 3rd-person imperfective forms) lead to ‘higher-level’ explicatures expressing a speaker’s evidential commitment. She argues that the evidential meaning does not arise from the semantic composition of linguistically encoded content but rather emerges as the optimal solution to a ‘feature mismatch’ between two components of encoded meaning.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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