Abstract Contrastive Topics are known to elicit a kind of pragmatic effect that is characterized as incompleteness, partiality, and/or uncertainty. Chapter 5 ‘Contrastive Topics Operate on Speech Acts’ by Satoshi Tomioka presents an analysis of this effect that makes appeal to contrasted speech acts. The majority of the empirical data discussed in the chapter come from Japanese, in which contrastive topics receive proto‐typical focus accents and the particle (‐wa) that signals a sentence topic must be employed. The proposed analysis derives the pragmatic effect of contrastive topics by making use of the contribution of focus accents, the function of the topic particle, and pragmatic inference based on the Gricean reasoning. A variety of consequences and implications of the analysis are also addressed.
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