On Expanditures

PARÍS, LUIS

Proceedings of the 40th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society

Chicago Linguistic Society

Lugar: Chichago; Año: 2008

It is a truism that verbs´ lexical entries contribute underspecified representations of eventualities to the sentences that contain them. This paper concerns the enrichment of those representations with the information coming from other phrases in the sentence and pragmatic inferences. For example, let´s look at the description of a Motion event in sentence (1). (1) El profesor entró al Aula. The professor entered to-the Classroom ´The professor walked into the classroom´ The presence of an asymmetry in the distribution of information is apparent. The initial part of the event is not as specifically described as the final part, by which I simply mean that there are more entailments associated with the latter. An alternative to the syntactic option is the pragmatic expression of Means; in this case the lexically underspecified information is not overtly expressed but it is nevertheless communicated through an inference that I call ´Means Expanditure´. The hearer pragmatically infers the proposition in sentence (2) –repeated below. (2) El profesor caminó ´The professor walked´ The inference is drawn from premises that express background knowledge coming from different sources. Despite ranging over different domains, this knowledge is equally represented with defaults. In the case of Motion, the background knowledge is about the default way in which entities move in relation to a certain kind of Path. (2) El profesor caminó ´The professor walked´ The inference is drawn from premises that express background knowledge coming from different sources. Despite ranging over different domains, this knowledge is equally represented with defaults. In the case of Motion, the background knowledge is about the default way in which entities move in relation to a certain kind of Path.