Pointing Things Out: Prominence and the Attentional State of a Discourse
Una Stojnić · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2021
This chapter provides the key elements of the account of context and context-sensitivity. Like the shifty, dynamic account of context in Chapter 3, this account models context as a running record of candidate interpretations for context-sensitive items, for exmaple, demonstrative pronouns. However, by contrast, the chapter argues that context organizes candidate interpretations by prominence. Further, it argues that prominence is fully linguistically determined: the context is updated exclusively by linguistic rules, through effects triggered by elements in the logical form of a discourse. These elements are richer than standardly thought, including, for example, contributions of demonstrative gestures. A demonstrative, then, receives a simple unambiguous meaning: as a matter of its meaning, it simply selects the most prominent interpretation that satisfies its lexically encoded constraints. This account is argued to be empirically more adequate, and avoids the theoretical challenges facing the alternatives discussed in earlier chapters.