Partial answers in Brazilian Portuguese: logic and contextual inferences
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18309/ranpoll.v54i1.1847Keywords:
semantic of questions, partial answers, implicatureAbstract
This paper investigates the semantic and pragmatic phenomena in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) dialogues with a yes/no questions and partial answers. In this answer type, the speaker brings less information than requested by the question. The research aimed to carry out a theoretical investigation, from the dialogs created by the author to identify the semantic and pragmatic phenomena: entailment, presupposition, implicature. From this point, we observe that the partial answer involves a specific type of implicature: generalized conversational implicature (GRICE,1975). Moreover, we can affirm that the answers establish a scale relation (HORN, 1972, 2004), in which the complete answers present a more informative alternative set (HAMBLIN, 1973); GROENENDIJK; STOKHOF, 1984); ROOTH, 1985). Focus answers and contrastive topic answers (BÜRING, 2003) are intermediaries. Answers with quantified phrases are less informative. There are more alternatives of set that are not evaluated in context. The speaker chooses the type of answer in accord with the Cooperative Principle and the conversational maxims (GRICE, 1975).
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