On the Syntactic Marking of Presupposed Open Propositions

Abstract

this paper, more specifically a subset of the inferences that correlate with the syntactic form of a sentence uttered. Beginning with the early functional syntax studies by Kuno, Bolinger, and others more than a decade ago, a good deal of research has been carried out that shows that particular syntactic forms correlate with particular non-truth-conditional inferences. Understandably, the work has been mostly descriptive in nature, more concerned with the necessary first steps of establishing what sorts of inferences may correlate with linguistic form than with finding general principles of such correlations. Thus the picture that one currently has is a very fragmented one, within a single language as well as cross-linguistically or universally. That is, it seems as though any syntactic form can in principle correlate with any understanding. This may of course be the case; however, one would like to investigate the possibility that there do exist general principles underlying such correlations, perhaps of a universal nature. In what follows, I shall very tentatively propose one possible universal generalization concerning syntactic form and non-truth-conditional understanding. And my tentativeness is real, not simply a nervously modest hedge: what I shall propose is rough hewn and requires deep crosslinguistic research, but, as I shall try to show, it is plausible on the basis of a sampling of the data and it provides an agenda for further research. 2. 'Information-packaging.'

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