RT list: Hello from a new subscriber

Dear all,

I am a Research Student and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire and have just joined the Relevance List.

I am interested in the role of inference in examples of reference assignment such as:

    a. The picnic was awful. The beer was warm.
    b. The beer was part of the picnic

Carston (2002) says that b. (an accessible assumption) acts as an implicit premise / bridging implicature that must be accessed in order to determine the referent of the beer in a. If this is the case, what is the implicated conclusion in this example? Also, would it not be possible to interpret this example via narrowing and the formation of the ad hoc concept beer* (representing the subset of properties that relate to beer being drunk at parties)?

Any comments on these issues would be greatly appreciated.

Best wishes,
Ruth Perry
Received on Fri Sep 11 19:28:04 2009