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Indicators and procedures: nevertheless and but

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2001

DIANE BLAKEMORE
DIANE BLAKEMORE
Affiliation:
University of Salford
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Abstract

The paper aims to clarify the Relevance theoretic notion of procedural meaning (cf. Blakemore 1987, Wilson & Sperber 1993) through the analysis of but and nevertheless. I show, first, that a procedural analysis is able to account for differences between these expressions that cannot be explained in terms of the speech-act theoretic notion of non-truth conditional indicators, and, second, that these differences show that the conception of procedural meaning as a constraint on contextual effects (cf. Blakemore 1987) is too narrow and must be extended to include all information about the inferential processes involved in utterance interpretation, including context selection.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , November 2000 , pp. 463 - 486
Copyright
2000 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This paper is a considerably revised (and expanded) version of papers I have delivered at the International Christian University Tokyo, Osaka University, the 1998 Relevance Theory Workshop at the University of Luton, and the University of Sheffield. I am very grateful to members of those audiences for many useful comments and criticisms and to Bob Borsley, Richard Breheney, Robyn Carston and Deirdre Wilson for helping me realize that it was all a lot more difficult than I thought it was. I would also like to thank the JL referees, whose comments and suggestions I found extremely useful in preparing my final revisions.For convenience, I have referred to the speaker as ‘she’ and the hearer as ‘he’.