Chapter 4 Concessive Clauses or How to Be Pragmatically Humble
In: Secondary Content
Author:
Claudia Borgonovo
Claudia Borgonovo
Search for other papers by Claudia Borgonovo in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Search for other papers by Claudia Borgonovo in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Abstract
There is a subtype of concessive clauses (CC s), event related CC s, that shows the classical traits of central adverbial clauses (Haegeman 2010, 2012). Event related CC s share with all other CC types the fact that they convey not at-issue content: they project under operators and can be dismissed. As a result, event-related CCS may never be focused, either informationally or contrastively. I derive this property from the impossibility of building an alternative set and excluding all alternatives but one. Taxonomically, e-related CC s are backgrounded, secondary assertions, since they satisfy the defining traits of neither presuppositions nor CI s.