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Contrast in Discourse: Guest Editors' Introduction

Contrast is a discourse relation that involves a comparison between two situations that are similar in one way, but different in another. In this special issue on the relation of Contrast in discourse the following questions are explored. How is Contrast marked (by the speaker) and how is it identified (by the hearer)? What is the discourse function of establishing Contrast? How do we account for the similarities as well as the differences between different types of linguistic tools and what cross-linguistic variation do we find? The present article serves as a brief introduction to the studies presented in this special issue on Contrast. 1 INTERPRETATION OF CONTRAST IN DISCOURSE Consider the following fragment (boldface is ours): (1) The buildings are all two and three stories running half a block deep with brick and glass fronts. Most were built together, a few have narrow alleys between them. Many are still boarded up, a couple were burned out years ago. (John Grisham, The Rainmaker) In (1), the incomplete noun phrases introduced by the determiners in boldface are anaphorically linked to the discourse topic the buildings. There is yet another meaning effect here. The pairs of predicates in the second and third sentence are interpreted contrastively. The interpretation that emerges is that buildings are either built together or have narrow alleys between them, and they are either still boarded up, or burned out years ago. Where does this reading come from? Contrast is defined in Mann & Thompson (1988) as a multinuclear rhetorical relation with no more than two nuclei such that Journal of Semantics, Vol. 21, No. 2, c © Oxford University Press 2004; all rights reserved 88 Contrast in Discourse the situations presented in these two nuclei are (a) comprehended as the same in many respects (b) comprehended as differing in a few respects and (c) compared with respect to one or more of these differences. According to Mann & Thompson, the effect of Contrast is that the reader recognizes the comparability and the difference(s) yielded by the comparison being made. We consider Contrast to be one (quite popular) way of fulfilling a general pragmatic constraint on anaphorization in the rhetorical domain (see de Hoop & de Swart 2000). That is, hearers prefer to interpret discourses as being coherent, i.e. to make anaphoric links wherever possible. One way of satisfying coherence in the discourse is to establish a relation of Contrast. This can be formulated as a constraint: (2) CONTRAST: Establish a rhetorical relation of Contrast between two situations. To see how a constraint like CONTRAST influences discourse interpretation, consider the interpretations obtained in (3) and (4) (the examples are also discussed in Hendriks & de Hoop 2001): (3) Most students attended the meeting. Some spoke. (4) Most deliveries were on time. Some weren’t. In (3) the preferred domain of quantification for the second determiner, some, is the set of students that attended the meeting (that is, the intersection of the sets A and B related by the first determiner, most). In (4), however, the domain of quantification for the second determiner, some, is not the set of deliveries that were on time, but the whole set of deliveries (set A of the first determiner, most). On the one hand, it is clear why the other reading is ruled out in (4). If some would quantify over the set of deliveries that were on time, we would get a contradictory interpretation, viz. that some deliveries that were on time weren’t on time. On the other hand, in (3) we get the intersection reading in the absence of contrastive predicates that would trigger a contrastive reading. We can explain the difference between the preferred interpretations in (3) and (4) in terms of the interaction between two constraints, CONTRAST and FORWARD DIRECTIONALITY (cf. Hendriks & de Hoop 2001). In (4) we establish a relation of Contrast between most deliveries that were on time and some that were not on time. However, in (3) such a relation of Contrast is not possible. There is no contrast between the situation that most students attended the meeting and Helen de Hoop and Peter de Swart 89 the situation that some students spoke. Hence, CONTRAST is violated for both candidate interpretations of (3). This does not mean that the discourse is incoherent. Satisfaction of a weaker constraint, FORWARD DIRECTIONALITY, saves the coherence of the discourse as well (cf. Hendriks & de Hoop 2001): (5) FORWARD DIRECTIONALITY: The original topic range induced by the domain of quantification of a determiner is reduced to the topic range induced by the intersection of the two argument sets of that determiner. FORWARD DIRECTIONALITY favours the interpretation obtained in (3). In (4) FORWARD DIRECTIONALITY is violated. If we assume that CONTRAST is ranked above FORWARD DIRECTIONALITY, we account for the right preferred interpretation in (4). Note furthermore that satisfaction of CONTRAST goes hand in hand with satisfaction of PARALLELISM, which was argued to be ranked below FORWARD DIRECTIONALITY by Hendriks & de Hoop (2001). (6) PARALLELISM: As the antecedent of an anaphoric expression, choose a parallel element from the preceding clause. Thus, as the reader may verify, the ranking in (7) accounts for the proper interpretations of the sentences in (1) and (3)–(4): (7) CONTRAST >> FORWARD DIRECTIONALITY >> PARAL-