A Semantics and Pragmatics for the Pluperfect

We offer a semantics and pragmatics of the pluperfect in narrative discourse. We examine in a formal model of implicature, how the reader's knowledge about the discourse, Gricean-maxims and causation contribute to the meaning of the pluperfect. By placing the analysis in a theory where the interactions among these knowledge resources can be precisely computed, we overcome some problems with previous Reichenbachian approaches.

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