Betty J. Birner

The semantics and pragmatics of and everything

Abstract Distinguishing between semantic and pragmatic factors in utterance interpretation is often problematic. The meaning of and everything is a case in point. Unlike the meaning of other set-marking tags (cf. Ball and Ariel 1978), the meaning of and everything is non-compositional. We propose that and everything instantiates a type of open proposition, obtained by replacing the entire conjunction with a variable. Semantically, and everything conveys only that the variable is to be instantiated by at least one other (typically unspecified) member of some inferrable set. However, in certain contexts the use of and everything may also generate an R-implicature (Horn 1984) to the effect that the proposition in question is true not only of some other member(s) of the set, but in fact of all members. In addition, the use of an L+H ∗ pitch accent on and everything conveys that the anchoring constituent exemplifies a high value on some scale; which particular scale is evoked is inferrable from the anchoring element itself and the context.

Information Structure and Syntactic Structure

This article explores the interface between syntactic structure and information structure – in particular, the broad generalizations that can be made between certain noncanonical word orders and information-structural constraints on their use. Various ways of implementing the distinction between ‘given’ and ‘new’ information are described, and several classes of word orders (such as preposings, postposings, argument reversals, and clefts) are discussed in terms of the information-status constraints to which they are sensitive. It is argued that classes of related word orders share related constraints but that – both cross-linguistically and within a single language – there are also construction-specific constraints on the correlation between word order and information status.

Components of events and processes.

Rips and Estin (1998) provided evidence that mental events such as dreaming are more homogeneous than physical events such as checking out a book; that is, their parts are more difficult to distinguish. In their experiment, participants listed more distinctive properties for the parts of physical events than for the parts of mental events. However, the physicality of stimuli was confounded with temporal aspects. Mental stimuli tended to be processes, and physical stimuli, events. This study tested homogeneity with new stimuli separating out the factors of physicality and aspect. Consistently, both physicality and aspect had significant effects on the perceived homogeneity of activities, as measured by the number of listed parts, the number of distinctive properties of each part, and homogeneity ratings. The study shows that homogeneity is strongly influenced by aspect but that physicality remains a robust factor for homogeneity, even after taking aspect into account. Some of the data reported in this article were collected as part of the Master’s thesis of the first author.