Pragmatic alternatives and social meaning

Abstract

The notion that an utterance's meaning in context depends not just on its entailments but also on what could have been said instead – that is, on pragmatic alternatives – is a key insight of pragmatic theory and has been employed fruitfully in accounting for central pragmatic phenomena like implicature. In this article we show why and how alternatives not only play a crucial role in familiar cases of implicature (e.g., some +> ‘not all’), but engender social meaning as well. Incorporating sociolinguistic theory and perspectives, we present a sociopragmatic framework that generalizes insights about alternatives in inference from previous pragmatic research. Then, taking as our empirical focus singular expressions of the form the X where an alternative like my/your X would be felicitous, we demonstrate the utility and broad scope of this framework. As we show, alternatives are crucial to interpretation and inference very generally, whether dealing in morphosyntactic objects or phonetics, situation descriptions or social meanings.