Author:
Altshuler Daniel,Truswell Robert
Abstract
AbstractThis chapter introduces Kehler’s Humean taxonomy of discourse relations, and explains Kehler’s use of that taxonomy to formalize Lakoff’s generalizations about discourse-semantic ‘scenarios’ which license asymmetric extraction from coordinate structures. This approach to extraction from coordinate structures stands in opposition to the approaches surveyed in Chapter 4, as it relies on discourse semantics rather than syntax. However, Lakoff’s project, properly formalized, is shown to be untenable, because Lakoff’s Type C scenario (involving the discourse relation result) is a special case of the Type A scenario (involving the discourse relation occasion), but the Type C extraction pattern is distinct from the Type A extraction pattern. Moreover, there are regularities among examples of Lakoff’s Type B scenario which do not follow from Kehler’s formalization in terms of the discourse relation violated expectation. Overall, in this chapter we conclude that discourse relations cannot directly account for the asymmetric extraction patterns that Lakoff observed.
Publisher
Oxford University PressOxford
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