Explicit Sentences And Syntactic Complexity

Preneh sentence (1) can be translated into English either by (2) or (3): (I) Leslie est 6tudlante (2) Leslie Is a student (3) Leslie Is a woman and Leslle Is a student It is clear however that nelther (2) nor (3) can be considered as an "exact" translation of (1). Sentence (2) does not carry the information that Leslie Is a woman and sentence (3) does not carry thls-information in the same way as (1)i the fact ~hat Leslie is a woman Is presupposed by (1) whereas it is asserted by (3). In other words sentence (3) is more explg-clt than sentence (1). Following Keenan (1973) we will say that a sentence S is more explicit than a sentence TIff S and T have the same consequences but some, presupposition ofT Is an assertion of S. Not only translations can be more explicit. Per instance (5) is more explicit that (4) since (4) presupposes (6) wherens (5) esserts (6): (4) Blll knows that Sue has phoned (5) Sue has phoned and Bill knows whether Sue has phoned or not (6) Sue has phoned RouKhly, defining sentences are, more explicit than "defined" sentenoese The questlon ld~ch we will try to answer in this paper is the follow~ one: are more explicit sentences-299