How far can pragmatic mechanisms take us?
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Christopher Potts
Abstract
1. Truckenbrodt's challenge
Hubert Truckenbrodt issues a substantive challenge near the start of his contribution:
The variation we observe in the connection between syntactic sentence types and their possibilities of use, while showing some flexibility, is not arbitrary or unrestricted. Narrow restrictions on this relation exist, which cannot plausibly stem from general purpose pragmatic mechanisms.
This is a bold statement. The field is only just now beginning to understand what general pragmatic mechanisms are like once we dig deeper than intuitive statements. One wonders: to what extent could a precise set of pragmatic mechanisms (maxims), interacting with semantic denotations, produce the “narrow restrictions” that Truckenbrodt carefully documents?
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- On the semantic motivation of syntactic verb movement to C in German
- How far can pragmatic mechanisms take us?
- On Truckenbrodt on Interrogatives
- Types, Moods, and Force Potentials: Towards a Comprehensive Account of German Sentence Mood Meanings
- Dependent Contexts in Grammar and in Discourse: German Verb Movement from the Perspective of the Theory of Mood Selection
- Is German V-to-C Movement Really Semantically Motivated? Some Empirical Problems
- Germanic V-in-C: Some Riddles
- Replies to the comments by Gärtner, Plunze and Zimmermann, Portner, Potts, Reis, and Zaefferer
- Mimetic gemination in Japanese: A challenge for Evolutionary Phonology
Articles in the same Issue
- On the semantic motivation of syntactic verb movement to C in German
- How far can pragmatic mechanisms take us?
- On Truckenbrodt on Interrogatives
- Types, Moods, and Force Potentials: Towards a Comprehensive Account of German Sentence Mood Meanings
- Dependent Contexts in Grammar and in Discourse: German Verb Movement from the Perspective of the Theory of Mood Selection
- Is German V-to-C Movement Really Semantically Motivated? Some Empirical Problems
- Germanic V-in-C: Some Riddles
- Replies to the comments by Gärtner, Plunze and Zimmermann, Portner, Potts, Reis, and Zaefferer
- Mimetic gemination in Japanese: A challenge for Evolutionary Phonology
