Secondary Content: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Side Issues

In addition to expressing some main content, utterances often convey secondary content, which is content that is not their ＂main point＂, but which rather provides side or background information, is less prominent than the main content, and shows distinctive behavior with respect to its role in discourse structure and which discourse moves it licenses. This volume collects original research papers on the semantics and pragmatics of secondary content. By covering a broad variety of linguistic phenomena that convey secondary content - including expressives, various particles, adverbials, pronouns, quotations, and dogwhistle language - the contributions show that secondary content is pervasive throughout different aspects of natural language and provide new insight into the nature of secondary content through new semantic and pragmatic analyses.

Daniel Gutzmann, Ph.D. (2013), University of Frankfurt, is a senior lecturer in German Linguistics at the University of Cologne, working on semantics, pragmatics. He is author of Use-Conditional Meaning (OUP, 2015) and co-edited two other volumes in the CRISPI series.

Katharina Turgay, Ph.D. (2010), University of Mainz, is a senior lecturer in German Linguistics at the University of Landau. She published two monographs and many articles on various grammatical and semantic topics, especially on non-formal varieties of language.

Contributors are: Ana Aguilar-Guevara, Patrícia Amaral, Claudia Borgonovo, Elena Castroviejo & Berit Gehrke, Laura Dörre & Andreas Trotzke, Mira Grubic, Holden Härtl, Robert Henderson, Stefan Hinterwimmer, Joachim Jacobs, Elin McCready, Kalle Müller, Osamu Sawada, Heiko Seeliger, and Matthijs Westera.