Brevity

Brevity in conversation is a window to the workings of the mind. This book brings it into prominence as both a multifaceted topic of deep philosophical importance and a phenomenon that serves as a testing ground for theories in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computer modeling. Brevity is achieved in a variety of ways. Speakers use elliptical constructions and exploit salient features of the conversational environment in a process of pragmatic enrichment so as to pack as much as possible into a few words. They take account of what has already been said in the current and previous conversations, and tailor their words to what they know about the beliefs and personalities of the people they're talking to. Most of the time they do all this with no obvious mental effort. The book, which brings together distinguished linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists, is the product of an interactive multidisciplinary research project that extended over four years. The questions dealt with concern how speakers secure understanding of what they mean when what they mean far outstrips the literal or compositional meanings of the sentences or sentence fragments that they use. Brevity sheds new light on economy in discourse. It will appeal to linguists, philosophers, and psychologists at advanced undergraduate level and above.PART I: BREVITY IN LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT ; 1. Fragment Answers to Questions: a case of inaudible syntax ; 2. Structuring Silence Versus the Structure of Silence ; 3. On Coordination in Conversational Dialogue: subsentential talk and its implications ; 4. Inexplicit Thoughts ; 5. Sub-Sentential Speech Acts, Reflexive Content, and Pragmatic Enrichment ; 6. A New Puzzle About Discourse-Initial Contexts ; 7. Transitive Meanings for Intransitive Verbs ; 8. Economy in Embodied Utterances ; PART II: THE PHILOSOPHY OF BREVITY ; 9. Some Consequences of "Speaking Loosely" ; 10. COntext, Compositionality, and Brevity ; 11. nd and And* ; 12. Insinuating Information and Accommodating Presupposition ; PART III: EXPERIMENTING WITH BREVITY ; 13. "Be Brief": from necessity to choice ; 14. Sizing up the Speaker: using speaker-specific information to detect the nature of children's inferences about meaning ; 15. The Influence of Perspective and Communicative Goals on How Speakers Choose to Refer ; 16. Narrowing ; PART IV: PROLIXITY ; 17. Relevance Theory and Prolixity ; References ; Index