ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with the variability of contextual meaning from the point of view of the speaker: how a speaker arrives at a linguistic form in context, in particular, how linguistic forms can be seen to arise out of contextually structured thinking. It concentrates instances in which a speaker makes a linguistic choice that would, based on a structural analysis of the language, appear to be atypical or peripheral in form or meaning, but that can be explained as arising from the particular meaningful oppositions that are active at that moment in the speaker's thinking. The chapter suggests that such a notion of focusing can be extended to all levels of a discourse participant's thinking. It examines some examples from the pragmatics literature and considers some attested and imagined contexts that affect the expected implicatures. The chapter discusses how contextually determined alternatives and marked linguistic uses figure in pragmatics, particularly in conversational implicature analyses.