Given as new: When redundant affirmation isn't

Abstract One diagnostic proposed for conventional implicature is based on the observation that while conversationally implicated material may freely be non-redundantly affirmed (Some but not all men are chauvinists; He was able to win and he did win), entailed and presupposed material normally may not be (∗He managed to win and he did win, ∗The king of France is bald and there is one). But under certain conditions, a proposition may be affirmed even after it has been entailed or presupposed by a prior clause. The acceptable citations involve concession/affirmation but-constructions: I don't know why I love you, but I do (vs. ∗I know why I love you, {and/but} I do). She won by a small margin, but win she did (vs. ∗She won by a large margin, {and/but} I do). This pattern instantiates the category of rhetorical opposition, adapted here from Anscombre and Ducrot's theory of argumentation: an affirmation is discourse-acceptable if it is argumentatively - or, more generally, rhetorically - opposed to the clause preceding it in the discourse that renders it informationally redundant. Following Ward (1985), an attempt is made to determine the circumstances under which an informationally redundant VP may be felicitously preposed, and redundant affirmation is situated within a dynamic framework for characterizing linguistic economy.

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