Constrastives and Gricean principle

Abstract

It has been observed that contrastive-markings in various languages are associated with uncertainty implicatures. However, a sentence can be contrastive-marked even when the speaker has a complete answer to the question, as long as one of the alternatives have an opposite value from the rest. Following the analyses by Spector 2003 and Schulz and van Rooij (in press) on exhaustivity and the Gricean Principle, this paper claims that Contrastive-marking presupposes that the speaker's knowledge is not maximal.