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‘Or’-parentheticals, ‘that is’-parentheticals and the pragmatics of reformulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2007

DIANE BLAKEMORE
DIANE BLAKEMORE
Affiliation:
University of Salford
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Abstract

The classification of that is, or (in other words), and or rather as reformulation markers would seem to suggest that the utterances they introduce achieve relevance in the same way. However, the examination of a range of discrepancies between reformulations introduced by or, on the one hand, and reformulations introduced by that is, on the other, suggests that any account of the pragmatics of reformulation must be a non-unitary one. In this paper, I build on Burton-Roberts' (1993) suggestion that the reformulations introduced by or are meta-linguistic in character, and show how these can be distinguished from the reformulations introduced by that is, which must be analysed at the level of conceptual representation. I also show how this distinction corresponds to a distinction between the different ways in which a parenthetical construction may be pragmatically integrated with its host. As Potts (2005) would predict, parenthetical that is-reformulations are not themselves part of the truth-conditional content of their hosts. However, in contrast with or-reformulations, they communicate information about the propositional content of their hosts, and in this way can contribute to the identification of their truth-conditional content at the level of pragmatic interpretation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , July 2007 , pp. 311 - 339
Copyright
2007 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This paper is based on research supported by the British Academy. The ideas it contains were first aired at presentations at the University of Essex and at the conference Interpreting for Relevance: Discourse and Translation, hosted by the University of Warsaw at Kazimierz Dolny. I am grateful to members of both audiences for their comments. I am also very grateful to Noel Burton-Roberts, Robyn Carston and an anonymous reviewer from the Journal of Linguistics for detailed comments on previous versions of the paper. Finally, I would like to thank Bob Borsley for suggesting that I should look at or-parentheticals in the first place. Clearly, I remain responsible for all errors and infelicities the paper contains.