A far from simple matter : syntactic reflexes of syntax-pragmatics misalignments

Abstract

It is a well-known fact that the relationship between syntactic structure and its semantico-pragmatic impact is often less than trivial or straightforward. One of the many cases that show this is found in examples like the following: (1) Would you be kind enough to open the window? The point here is that this is syntactically speaking a yes/no question but is pragmatically most naturally interpreted as a request. Hence, (2a) is slightly surprising as an answer, while (2b) is the expected answer. (2) a. Yes, I would. b. OK, I will. / No, I won't. In the pragmatics literature, such cases are referred to as 'speech act idioms ' or as 'short-circuited conversational implicatures ' (cf. Horn (1988) for a concise discussion). Put in yet another, perhaps more syntactic way, one might say that the subordinate clause in (1) is semantico-pragmatically superordinate in that the subordinate clause conveys the content of the request while the superordinate clause translates into 'please'.

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