Negative Inversion, Social Meaning, and Gricean Implicature

A Study Across Three Texas Ethnolects

By:

William Salmon

Format:

Hardback

Series:

Mouton Series in Pragmatics [Msp]

Show Hide Adult Content

$363.99

Available from supplier

Usually ships in 3-4 weeks

0 in Trolley

Price Match

Buy Now, Pay Later with:

4 payments of $91.00 with Afterpay Learn more

Availability

Delivering to:

Estimated arrival:

Around 13-25 June using International Courier

Description

Relying on a wealth of new data, this book argues that long-standing puzzles of Negative Inversion (NI) syntax are not puzzles at all when viewed through the lenses of Gricean pragmatics and Labovian sociolinguistics. Focusing on sentences such as "Can't nobody lift that rock" in African American, Anglo, and Chicano Englishes in Texas, the book provides tidy solutions to problems such as: the NI’s relationship to its non-inverted counterpart, its relationship to existential “there” sentences, to modal existential sentences, to the definiteness effects surrounding its NP subject, the emphatic meaning with which it seems to be associated, and more. The book argues that such issues, which have been explored in the syntax and semantics literature since the late 1960s, are handled more fruitfully via Gricean reasoning, demographics of use, and a simple semantics. As such, the book argues that NI can be freed from the “syntactico-semantic straitjacket” into which it has often been forced. It also demonstrates ways in which pragmatic and sociolinguistic thought can be brought together to inform larger linguistic analyses.

Author Biography:

William Salmon, University of Minnesota Duluth, USA.

Release date Australia

June 8th, 2020

Author

William Salmon

Audiences

Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Professional & Vocational
Professional & Vocational

Illustrations

7 Tables, black and white

Pages

232

Series

Mouton Series in Pragmatics [Msp]

ISBN-13

9781501519277

Product ID

32631059

Customer reviews

Nobody has reviewed this product yet. You could be the first!

Write a Review

Marketplace listings

There are no Marketplace listings available for this product currently.
Already own it? Create a free listing and pay just 9% commission when it sells!

Sell Yours Here