Yasutada Sudo (UCL)

Pragmatics with Discourse Referents


Theories of discourse anaphora represent discourse referents separately from propositional content (Karttunen 1976, Heim 1982, Kamp 1983, Elbourne 2005, etc.). It is then natural to expect information about discourse referents to be relevant for pragmatic inferences, but most current theories of pragmatics seem to ignore it. I will look at some cases of scalar inferences where information about discourse referents gives rise to non-trivial effects and discuss how exactly scalar inferences should be computed.