Affective demonstratives and the division of pragmatic labor

Abstract

Building on [1] and [2], [3] argues for a 'division of pragmatic labor': as a result of general pragmatic interactions, unmarked expressions are generally used to convey unmarked messages and marked expressions are generally used to convey marked messages (see also [4,5]). [6] explicitly splits this into two separate pressures ("What is expressed simply is stereotypically identified" and "What's said in an abnormal way isn't normal"), and [7], [8], [9], and [10] seek to characterize the opposition in terms how form-meaning pairs are optimally chosen. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.