Open AccessConditional inversion and GIVENNESS
Author(s) -
María Biezma
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
proceedings from semantics and linguistic theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2163-5951
pISSN - 2163-5943
DOI - 10.3765/salt.v21i0.2591
Subject(s) - inversion (geology) , antecedent (behavioral psychology) , linguistics , computer science , subject (documents) , meaning (existential) , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , psychology , epistemology , philosophy , social psychology , paleontology , structural basin , library science , biology
This paper provides support for the claim that non-canonical word-order adds “extra meaning” to natural language utterances (Prince). In particular, it tells us about the informational status of the constituents. The case study in this paper is subject-auxiliary inversion in conditional antecedents. I argue that subject-auxiliary inversion in conditional antecedents indicate that the antecedent is GIVEN (Schwarzschild 1999). This proposal explain further pragmatic inferences such as why inverted conditionals are particularly good as reproaches.