Chapter 2 provides an overview of the main ideas and principles of relevance theory. The cognitive and communicative principles of relevance are introduced, along with the notion of procedural meaning. The roles that these principles and concepts play in utterance interpretation are discussed. Attention then turns to reference with an overview of Wilson’s (1992) relevance-based account. The importance of the role of accessibility of context and referents in understanding the process of reference resolution is highlighted. Focus then turns to the cognitive process of referring itself. The act of resolving reference is presented as the process of mapping argument slots in the logical form of an utterance onto conceptual files. Referring expressions are a means by which a speaker can guide a hearer in this process. That is, they are procedural in nature. As with other interpretive processes, reference resolution is driven by the presumption of optimal relevance. The processes of mapping an argument slot onto a conceptual file and enriching that conceptual file are driven from the bottom-up by the semantics of the verb and constrained from the top-down by considerations of relevance.

The final chapter brings together the themes from across the volume and revisits the research questions which have driven the discussion. The main conclusions are briefly summarized and some suggestions are made for possible implications of the work and for future directions.

Chapter 1 introduces the key aims and objectives for the volume in terms of three main research questions. What motivates a speaker to use one expression rather than another in a particular discourse context? How do the components of a referring expression contribute to communication of the speaker’s meaning? In other words, what do referring expressions encode, and how does this interact with the context? What, beyond reference resolution, do referring expressions contribute to the overall speaker’s meaning, and how? The chapter then provides a brief overview of the main concerns of philosophical and stylistic approaches to reference, making links with the pragmatic approach adopted in this volume. Finally, an overview of the rest of the book is provided.

Chapter 6 applies the relevance-based account of referring expressions to the phenomenon of null subjects in non-pro-drop languages. So-called diary-style nulls, it is argued, are ultimately driven by the interaction of effects and effort and therefore by the speaker’s aim of achieving optimal relevance. Three broad categories of null subject use in English are identified: an informal null subject where the omission leads to extra cognitive effects, a pressurized null subject where the speaker’s abilities are the crucial factor, and finally, an ostensively vague null subject, which is driven by the speaker’s preferences. These three categories are not presented as an exhaustive taxonomy of English null subjects, or as theoretically distinct. Rather they emerge as a result of a speaker aiming at optimal relevance in different discourse contexts, and they represent occasions where different elements in the overall equation of optimal relevance drive lexical omissions.

Chapter 7 presents a context-based unitary analysis of demonstratives in English. Existing work reveals a wide and disparate range of effects associated with choice of demonstrative, and in this chapter, it is argued that these various and wide-ranging communicated effects are derived pragmatically. Procedures are proposed for both the proximal and distal demonstrative determiners, and a range of examples are discussed. It is argued that all of the identified uses and functions of demonstratives derive from the same underlying procedures, and that these procedures can interact with the discourse context to create effects that go beyond simply resolving reference. Examples from advertising and political discourse are discussed along with literary examples, and a range of stylistic effects are identified and explained on the procedural, relevance-based analysis.

This book presents contributions to the study of interfaces that have been shaped and inspired in profound ways by María Luisa Zubizarreta’s research program. Since the 1970s, Zubizarreta’s work has pioneered analyses in which the notion of interfaces (or levels of representation) played an essential role. Her research has fundamentally shaped the direction of Romance linguistics and generative grammar over this period. Her first book (Zubizarreta, 1987) explored in some detail issues related to the internal organization of the lexicon and its relationship to syntax. In her third book (Zubizarreta & Oh, 2007), the relationship between a constructional approach to meaning and the lexicon was further investigated by studying how verbal and predicate meaning components, such as manner and motion, articulate in Germanic, Korean, and Romance. In Korean serial verb constructions, manner and motion are encoded in separate morphosyntactic units, whereas in Germanic and Romance the same analysis holds but at a more abstract level of syntactic representation.

Polarity-sensitive items are a peculiar kind of linguistic object. As Israel (2004, p. 207) notes: they are a class of items “which do not themselves express negation or affirmation, but which are restricted to sentences of one or the other polarity.” Broadly speaking, polarity items are expressions whose distribution is sensitive to contexts that express contradiction, contrariety, or reversal (Israel, 2004).

Idioms are also peculiar kinds of objects that have complex syntactic structure but behave like individual lexical units. It turns out that many polarity-sensitive items are idioms, and that intersection provides an interesting insight about both categories, which I will explore in this chapter.

Transfer, i.e. the influence of the first language (L1) in the interlanguage (IL), is a characteristic phenomenon of the process of second language (L2) acquisition. In the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), different theories have been proposed to predict how and in which stages the grammatical properties for the L1 are manifested in the IL. According to the theory of Full Transfer / Full Access (Schwartz & Sprouse 1994, 1996), the grammar of the L1 in its entirety is the initial state of the IL. Afterwards, depending on the properties of the L1 and L2, the linguistic input to which the learner is exposed acts as a triggering factor in the reconstruction of the IL grammar. This restructuring process is conditioned by Universal Grammar (UG); for the most part, the IL complies with the restrictions imposed by UG during this whole process.

A well-studied phenomenon in Spanish (and in Romance languages in general) is clitic placement in constructions with so-called restructuring verbs, such as querer “want,” deber “must,” poder “can/may,” soler (habitual aspect), empezar “begin,” estar “be” – which are sometimes dubbed semi-auxiliary verbs, since they express modality and aspect – as well as the true auxiliary haber “have” (see Burzio, 1986; Cardinaletti & Shlonsky, 2004; Cinque, 2004, 2006; Perlmutter, 1983; Strozer, 1976; among many others). What is especially noteworthy about these constructions is that, when pronominal clitics are used, these may be associated either with the main finite verb or the lexical verb in a non-finite form.

Unaccusative verbs have been the object of much study and research, especially regarding the causative alternation. While there have been many studies that analyze the causative alternation or the nature of the aspectual properties of the clitic se in Romance languages (see for example, Alexiadou et al., 2015; Basilico, 2010; De Cuyper, 2006; Kempchinsky, 2004; Nishida, 1994; Schäfer, 2008; Zagona, 1996), there are not many which provide a uniform account for the distribution of the clitics with the different types of unaccusative verbs in Spanish as a whole, whether they participate or not in the causative alternation. This chapter provides a uniform account for all unaccusative verbs in Spanish, and analyzes the distribution of obligatory PPs and clitics. The analysis adopted here is based on Hale & Keyser’s (2002) model, as developed in Zubizarreta & Oh (2007), which is summarized in Section 3.2, and Mayoral Hernández (2008, 2010).

Degree achievement verbs (increase, fall, grow, age) present challenges for theories of argument structure based on aspectual characterizations (Abusch, 1986; Dowty, 1979, 1991; among others). These verbs show variable behavior with respect to telicity, and, furthermore, the (a)telic interpretation is not straightforwardly affected by properties of the verbs’ arguments, unlike the case of incremental theme verbs (eat an apple vs. eat apples) or directed motion verbs (descend vs. descend the stairs).

A subclass of degree achievement verbs is morphologically related to gradable adjectives (widen, cool, dry, lengthen) and they too exhibit the peculiar telicity properties of the wider class of degree achievements. It is now standardly believed that the aspectual properties of deadjectival degree achievements can be attributed to the scalar structure of the base adjective (Deo et al., 2013; Hay et al., 1999; Kennedy & Levin, 2008; Winter, 2006).