Subsentential utterances, ellipsis, and pragmatic enrichment

It is argued that genuinely subsentential phrases can be used to perform speech acts with truth conditions. Attempts to assimilate this phenomenon to syntactic ellipsis (sluicing, gapping, etc.) are discussed, and are rejected on the grounds that any implementation of this idea will involve a redundant level of representation in natural language that plays no role in the interpretation process, and therefore be less economical than a pragmatic enrichment account. An argument against the latter kind of approach from the indeterminacy of content is discussed, then it is shown how a pragmatic account can accommodate this indeterminacy and turn it into an advantage through consideration of the role of processing effort in inferential comprehension.