Abstract
This research aimed to analyze dialogues in Brazilian Portuguese (hereinafter BP) consisting of open questions or wh-questions and their corresponding complete or partial answers. Specifically, this work sought to investigate the inferences involved in each type of answer: entailments, presuppositions, and conversational implicatures. Additionally, the study aimed to develop a scale of possible answers to constituent questions, ranging from the most informative, or most assertive, to the least informative. Our hypothesis is that there is a scalar relationship between the diversity of answers to constituent questions, as well scalar implicatures. The theoretical foundation is based on studies in formal semantics and pragmatics, such as the semantics and pragmatics of questions, the Cooperative Principle, and scalar implicatures. The methodology employed was introspective, involving the creation of dialogues with wh-questions and various complete or partial responses, including prosodic focus marking, contrastive topic marking, universal and existential quantifiers, among others. After analyzing the dialogues, it can be concluded that depending on the type of answer, diverse types of inferences are triggered, ranging from entailments and presuppositions of exhaustiveness to conversational implicatures of exhaustiveness and speaker's lack of knowledge. Furthermore, the study proposes a logical scale, ranging from the most informative answers with entailment to the least informative, with a generalized conversational implicature of the speaker's lack of knowledge.
Keywords:
wh-questions; conversational implicatures; conversational dynamic; formal semantics; formal pragmatics