Modal Adverbs and Discourse: Two Essays.

Pisa, Edizioni ETS cm.17x24, pp.177,(7), brossura, cop.con bandelle. Collana Progetti Linguistici,14. This book is divided into two connected essays. In the first essay, Dr Capone deals with modal adverbs, such as 'obviously', 'really', 'certainly', etc. explicating their semantic contributions to the assertions in which they occur. After dealing with the issue of a speaker' s commitment to an asserted proposition in terms of the pragmatics of contexts of use, Dr Capone moves on to the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis of the adverbs above, in terms of the theory of implicit arguments and modal (opacity) effects. Dr Capone , in connection with the adverb 'certainly' also deals with certain ambiguities of use reducing them to a single lexical entry sensitive to contextual information. Dr Capone then moves on to the pragmatic analysis of modal adverbs in real contexts of use and analyses their contributions in terms of conversationalimplicatures. In the second essay, which provides a theoretical framework for the analysis of discourse, the author deals with communicative competence as the ability to produce discourses in context.…