Abstract
The man is proposing to the woman and her response, maybe, has more than one potential meaning (Verschueren in Understanding Pragmatics. Oxford University Press, New York, 1999). The most likely meaning is that she is uncertain about whether to marry this man; another interpretation could be that she is playing hard to get. Maybe is a type of language which is termed ‘elastic language’ (EL) ( Zhang in Elastic language: How and why we stretch our words. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015). EL refers to utterances with fluidity, where language interpretations overlap.
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Zhang, G., Parvaresh, V. (2019). Introduction. In: Elastic Language in Persuasion and Comforting. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28460-2_1
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