Cummins Chris, Rohde Hannah
Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK.
Front Psychol. 2015 Nov 26;6:1779. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01779. eCollection 2015.
Although it is widely acknowledged that context influences a variety of pragmatic phenomena, it is not clear how best to articulate this notion of context and thereby explain the nature of its influence. In this paper, we target contextual alternatives that are evoked via focus placement and test how the same contextual manipulation can influence three different phenomena that involve pragmatic enrichment: scalar implicature, presupposition, and coreference. We argue that focus placement influences these three phenomena indirectly by providing the listener with information about the likely question under discussion (QUD) that a particular utterance answers (Roberts, 1996/2012). In three listening experiments, we find that the predicted interpretations are indeed made more available when focus placement is added to the final element (to the scalar adjective, to an entity embedded under the negated presupposition trigger, and to the predicate of a pronoun). These findings bring together several distinct strands of work on the effect of focus placement on interpretation all in the domain of pragmatic enrichment. Together they advance our empirical understanding of the relation between focus placement and QUD and highlight commonalities between implicature, presupposition, and coreference.
尽管人们普遍承认语境会影响各种语用现象，但目前尚不清楚如何最好地阐述语境这一概念，进而解释其影响的本质。在本文中，我们针对通过焦点放置引发的语境替代项，并测试相同的语境操作如何影响涉及语用充实的三种不同现象：等级含义、预设和指代。我们认为，焦点放置通过向听众提供有关特定话语所回答的可能讨论问题（QUD）的信息，间接影响这三种现象（罗伯茨，1996/2012）。在三项听力实验中，我们发现，当焦点放置添加到最后一个元素（等级形容词、否定预设触发词下嵌入的实体以及代词的谓语）时，预测的解释确实更容易获得。这些发现汇集了语用充实领域中关于焦点放置对解释影响的几个不同研究方向。它们共同推进了我们对焦点放置与QUD之间关系的实证理解，并突出了含义、预设和指代之间的共性。
