Modal adverbs and discourse: two essays

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.