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Columns::April 21, 2003
Weekly Reader
Professor analyzes spoken Spanish
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$87
John Benjamins Publishing Company |
Implicatures in Discourse examines Spanish conversations and oral narratives to seek support for a pragmatic theory of anaphora.
The book is written by UGA associate professor of Romance languages Sarah Blackwell. She argues that the use of anaphoric expressions may be considered conversational implicatures that give rise to inferences of coreference and non- coreference.
“Even after living in Madrid for several years, I would still, at times, ‘get lost’ in a conversation . . . . due to the fact that I couldn’t figure out who (or what) the speaker had just referred to,” Blackwell says. “By failing to infer this important bit of information, I was usually unable to interpret subsequent reference to the same entities, which would cause me to ‘lose the thread’ [of the conversation] completely.”
Blackwell’s analysis of two genres of spoken Spanish, conversations and narratives, shows speakers abide by Levinson’s “neo-Gricean” principles of quantity, informativeness and manner but that grammatical, semantic, cognitive and pragmatic constraints interact with the neo-Gricean principles, influencing anaphora use and interpretation. The study also reveals how mutual knowledge, including familiarity with Spanish social and cultural norms, enables interlocutors to use and comprehend minimal referring expressions, which cultural outsiders may not be able to interpret. |
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