Introduction: Alternatives in Semantics and Pragmatics

Abstract

In producing and interpreting sentences, speakers constantly process information about other things that could have been said. The alternative linguistic forms that a speaker chooses not to use often play a significant part in the grammaticality and felicity of an utterance in a given context. As a result, both semantic and pragmatic theories need to provide an explicit model of alternatives and their relation to assertions. The idea that the well-formedness of sentences may be determined by a selection among competing forms or interpretations plays a key part in many linguistic phenomena and has been at the core of several theoretical frameworks.¹ In semantics and pragmatics, the issue became more prominent when an increasing number of phenomena were argued to have a semantics that makes direct reference to alternatives. Among them, there are three main topics that have been extensively studied and constitute the primary sources of alternative semantics (i.e. semantics based on alternatives): questions (e.g. Hamblin 1973, Karttunen 1977, Groenendijk and Stokhof 1984, Hagstrom 1998, Shimoyama 2001, Lahiri 2002), focus (e.g. Rooth 1985, 1992, Beck 2006, Wagner 2006, Beaver and Clark 2008), and implicatures (e.g. Horn 1972, 1989, Gazdar 1979, Hirschberg 1985, Levinson 2000, Zimmermann 2000, Chierchia 2004, Sauerland 2004, Fox 2007, Geurts 2010). Although the range of applications of alternative semantics has been constantly expanding, these are the domains that have shaped the definition of alternatives as semantic/pragmatic objects. The proposed alternative-based accounts make use of alternative sets, but do not necessarily rely on a common set of assumptions regarding alternatives.