The place of impositions in the meaning typology

Abstract

The paper reviews the notion of the imposition introduced in the paradigm of dynamic semantics. An imposition is an informative and automatic update of the common ground or the context set. This type of context update is associated with appositive clauses, evidential markers, parenthetical constructions. An imposition encodes the discourse behavior of its bearer, which allows us to examine the interplay between the semantic representation of an expression, its discourse change potential, the broader context, and the speaker’s intentions behind the information packaging. The paper also compares the notion of the imposition with the more traditional notions of conventional implicature and presupposition.