| In Classical rhetoric, the term anakolouthon was used to describe the effect of changing syntactic structures within a single sentence. This might be due to a speaker error or change of plan mid-sentence, but it could also be performed as a manipulation of style, a solecism intended for dramatic effect. In this dissertation, I consider a contemporary instance of anacolutha, but it is one that is neither error nor intentional solecism. Rather, it is one that is very frequent in spoken language and one that teaches important lessons about how speakers manage and exploit aspects of a discourse: I refer to it as a double-subject sentence (DSS).;The DSS is composed of two basic elements. The first of these can be considered what is primary in the speech act. It is the root utterance, and the proposition it contains is easily seen to bear the main point of the act. The second element, as Frege might say, arouses the imagination, but it is harder to pin down. It is part of the background, and it conveys no primary information and makes no clear assertion. Its purpose is to stabilize the discourse, to arrange the discourse conditions in which the primary utterance can be found felicitous. Like the title of a poem or the epigraph of a novel, it illuminates the utterance to come.;This illumination is the subject of this dissertation. How is the initial parenthetical element related to the primary utterance? How is it related to prior and situational context? I consider this element alongside other, more well-known (if not better understood) kinds of secondary or backgrounded content, such as Grice's notion of conventional implicature, Chris Potts's (2005) ideas of multidimensional semantic content, and Nathan Salmon's (2002) ideas on the role of context in demonstratives. I suggest ultimately that a Gricean account of the DSS---in terms of conventional implicature---provides a satisfactory means of discussing the double-subject sentence. This allows us to provide for the specific semantic and pragmatic properties relevant to the DSS. It also offers us a glimpse of how speakers predict the mental states of their interlocutors, as they order and pragmatically structure propositions to fit the needs of a given situation in a discourse. |
