Why use or?

Or constructions introduce a set of alternatives into the discourse. But alternativity does not exhaust speakers' intended messages. Speakers use the profiled or alternatives as a starting point for expressing a variety of readings. Ever since (Grice, H. Paul. 1989. Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) and (Horn. 1972. On the semantic properties of the logical operators in English. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Los Angeles dissertation), the standard approach has assumed that or has an inclusive lexical meaning and a predominantly exclusive use, thus focusing on two readings. While another, "free choice", reading has been added to the repertoire, accounting for the exclusive reading remains a goal all or theorists must meet. We here propose that both "inclusive" and "exclusive" interpretations, as currently defined, do not capture speakers' intended readings, which we equate with the relevance-theoretic explicature. Adopting a usage-based approach to language, we examined all the or occurrences in the Santa Barbara Corpus of spoken American English (1053 tokens), and found that speakers use or utterances for a far richer variety of readings than has been recognized. In line with Cognitive Linguistics, we propose that speakers' communicated intentions are better analyzed in terms of subjective construals, rather than the objective conditions obtaining when the or proposition is true. We argue that in two of these readings speakers are not necessarily committed to even one of the alternatives being the case. In the most frequent reading, the overt disjuncts only serve as pointers to a higher-level concept, and it is that concept that the speaker intends to refer to

Heterogeneous sets: a diachronic typology of associative and similative plurals

This paper provides a diachronic typology of what we call ‘heterogeneous plurals’, an overarching term comprising associative plurals (expressions meaning X[person] & company) and similative plurals (expressions meaning X and similar entities). Based on a 110-language sample, we identify the most recurrent sources of these two types of plurals by means of various types of evidence (homophony/identity, internal reconstruction, comparison with cognate languages). The two types of plurals develop out of different source types: while the sources of associative plurals include elements that work as set constructors (plural anaphoric elements, plural possessives, names meaning ‘group’), those of similative plurals comprise elements with vague reference such as interrogative/indefinite items or uncertainty markers. There are also a few source types that may develop into both associative and similative plurals, such as connectives (‘and/with’) and universal quantifiers (‘every/all’). The differences in the diachronic pathways leading to the two types of plurals are explained in terms of the different referential properties of the nominal bases from which they are formed (proper names/kin terms vs. common nouns), but also taking into account the typical discourse contexts in which the two types of plurals are employed

Constructing lists to construct categories

The aim of this paper is to analyze list constructions as linguistic tools to build categories in discourse, identifying the inferential processes leading from list constructions to categorization and examining the semantic and morphosyntactic elements that activate abstractive reasoning within lists. Based on real occurrences of lists in written and spoken Italian, we will first of all propose a crucial distinction between exhaustive and non-exhaustive lists, arguing that (non-)exhaustivity determines the layer at which the construction of a category occurs, namely the layer of presupposition or the \u2018what-is-said\u2019 part of the utterance. We will then focus on non-exhaustive lists, arguing that they directly communicate a bottom-up, exemplar-driven abstraction, characterized by the presence of an inherently indexical reference (i.e. reference to further Xs characterized by some underlying Property P), which will lead us to call it \u2018indexical categorization\u2019. The linguistic analysis of how indexical categorization is expressed in discourse will show a major distinction between (i) elements characterized by an indexical semantics, which trigger the abstraction process, and (ii) elements providing semantic clues towards the correct construction of the indexical category. We will conclude by taking a broader perspective and by explaining the patterns observed for indexical categorization in the light of the wider process of online reference construction

Non-exhaustive connectives

This paper provides the first cross-linguistic study on non-exhaustive connectives. After defining non-exhaustivity and briefly exploring the range of linguistic strategies encoding it across languages, the methodology underlying the study will be discussed. Based on the analysis of 35 languages, for which at least one non-exhaustive connective was found, it will be argued that non-exhaustive connectives exhibit quite homogenous distributional properties and derive from a restricted set of recurrent diachronic sources. Speakers are indeed likely to mobilize i) elements already encoding or implying non-exhaustivity, ii) elements expressing an epistemic condition of uncertainty, or iii) elements expressing exemplification

DIVERSITÀ TRA LE LINGUE E PRAGMATICA

Questo lavoro intende discutere la relazione tra universali del linguaggio e uso del linguaggio stesso, prendendo in esame la diversità (e l’universalità) che lingue del mondo mostrano in relazione alla pragmatica. Dopo un inquadramento preliminare del rapporto tra tipologia e pragmatica, verranno descritti due casi di studio recenti, che permettono di osservare da vicino il rapporto tra i due ambiti. La prima ricerca scelta per illustrare la questione prende in esame l’espressione esplicita della gratitudine in otto lingue, mentre la seconda indaga le strategie di riparazione a problemi di comunicazione in dodici lingue. In entrambi i casi la ricerca è stata condotta da un team ampio di ricercatori, che ha raccolto dati di parlato spontaneo all’interno di campioni di lingue appartenenti a famiglie linguistiche diverse, parlate in aree geografiche anche molto distanti. I risultati di queste ricerche mostrano comportamenti linguistici molto simili anche in lingue e culture diverse, suggerendo che il modo si usa il linguaggio abbia alcune caratteristiche universali, che dipendono solo in minima parte dalla lingua e dalla cultura.   Diversity between languages and pragmatics This paper discusses the relationship between language universals and the use of language itself, looking at the diversity (and universality) that the world’s languages in relation to pragmatics. After a preliminary framing of the relationship between pragmatics and linguistic typology, two recent case studies will be described for a closer look at the relationship between these two fields. The first study examines the explicit expression of gratitude in eight languages, while the second investigates repair strategies due to communication problems in twelve languages. In both cases, research was conducted by a large team of researchers, who collected spontaneous speech data from samples including languages from different families, spoken in distant geographical areas. The results show very similar linguistic behaviors even in different languages and cultures, suggesting that the way language is used has some universal characteristics, which depend only in a small part on the specific language and culture

The encoding of irrelevance in discourse: tanto between concession and justification

This paper sets out to investigate the linguistic expression of irrelevance in discourse, by focusing on the functions and uses of the marker tanto in present-day Italian. The marker encodes the irrelevance of a given condition, thus conveying a concessive meaning not distant from the value expressed by concessive conditionals or ‘no matter’ predicates. In the construction [p, tanto q], the marker tanto conveys the fact that q holds in any case, namely whether p, non-p,or any value of p is the case. After discussing how the notion of irrelevance has been treated in the literature on condition-als, concessives and predicates of indifference, we will discuss the results of a corpus-based study on spoken Italian, identifying and annotating all the occurrences of irrelevance-tanto. We will show that irrelevance may be expressed by a number of different discourse patterns, explicitly mentioning the irrelevant proposition, the null-effect and the motivation for irrelevance, or omitting one or more of these components. It will be argued that the cases in which speakers simply refer to the irrelevance of a given proposition are rare in our sample, whereas it is more frequent that they also mention the motiva-tion underlying irrelevance, justifying their indifference and thus crucially acting at the intersubjective level. We will show that tanto may also be used alone as a discourse marker encoding the speaker’s attitude of indifference: in these cases, tanto is pronounced with suspensive intonation, and subsumes under its semantics the adversative, justificative, and indiscriminative value, activating meanings that speakers are supposed to share

Questione di 'stile'. L'espressione analitica della maniera indessicale

This contribution aims to explore the semantic and structural properties of the construction [‘stile’ N], an analytical construction that is taking hold in contemporry Italian to express manner starting from nouns. The word ‘stile’ “style” followed by a nominal often appears within prepositional phrases (e.g. ‘in puro stile McDonald’ “in pure McDonald style”), but in this work we focus on the occurrences in which ‘stile’ is juxtaposed to the head it modifies, without the intermediation of the preposition (e.g. ‘musica di sottofondo stile piano-bar’ “piano-bar-style background music”). Based on examples extracted from the corpus of written Italian CORIS, we how these uses are regulated by a series of formal and functional properties, which lead us to analyze this pattern in terms of Construction Grammar. Great attention is devoted to inherently indexical semantics of this construction, the interpretation of which largely depends on context and shared knowledge. To conclude, some analytical constructions competing with [‘stile’ N] are briefly discussed, illustrating their different distribution and proposing some explanatory hypotheses to be answered through new dedicated and wide-renging research

"Piuttosto che": dalla preferenza all’esemplificazione di alternative

"Piuttosto che": dalla preferenza all’esemplificazione di alternativ