TY - JOUR AU - Katzir, Roni AU - Singh, Raj PY - 2019/05/11 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Economy of structure and information: Oddness, questions, and answers JF - Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung JA - SuB VL - 19 IS - 0 SE - Articles DO - 10.18148/sub/2015.v19i0.236 UR - https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/view/236 SP - 322-339 AB - <p>We examine two conflicting perspectives on oddness: Magri (2009, 2011)’s theory, which derives oddness from blind inferences that clash with common knowledge, and Spector (2014)’s theory that derives oddness from trivial alternatives. Building on these works, we offer a third alternative, one that relies on a discourse condition that says that a good assertion is one that provides a good answer to a good question. A remaining difficulty is the persistence of oddness when the relevant sentences are embedded in environments that are predicted to satisfy the proposed appropriateness conditions.</p> ER -