A Reanalysis of Adverbs in A-not-A Questions

DOI

10.2991/icelaic-18.2018.102How to use a DOI?

Keywords

the distribution of adverbs in A-not-A question; pragmatic anomaly

Abstract

The paper proposes a pragmatic analysis of the distribution of adverbs in A-not-A questions. It argues that “most adverbs” will cause pragmatic anomaly when appearing before the A-not-A form, while temporal and locative adverbs will not. According to the ontological properties of adverbs, “most adverbs” are named as propositional adverbs and temporal and locative adverbs as possible world adverbs. Propositional adverbs ontologically are part of the proposition or event, and thus presuppose that the speaker knows something about the event. However, possible world adverbs are ontologically independent of the events and have no such presupposition. Besides these, A-not-A form induces two mutually exclusive events and presuppose an ignorant state of the speaker. The pragmatic anomaly arises from the contradictory cognitive state of being ignorant when using the A-not-A form on one hand and being non-ignorant when using propositional adverbs and a specific verb on the other hand. However, possible world adverbs are ontologically independent of the events and thus compatible with the ignorance presupposition of the A-not-A form. The analysis predicts the distributive pattern of speech act adverbs in A-not-A questions.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xie Lili
PY  - 2018/12
DA  - 2018/12
TI  - A Reanalysis of Adverbs in A-not-A Questions
BT  - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Inter-cultural Communication (ICELAIC 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 479
EP  - 482
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icelaic-18.2018.102
DO  - 10.2991/icelaic-18.2018.102
ID  - Lili2018/12
ER  -