Pragmatics and grammar: Motivation and control

From the introduction: Much of what has been done as pragmatics has dealt with utterance interpretation, that is, with the influence of context on meaning. Relatively little has been said about the interaction between context and form. As a result, there is much we do not know about how pragmatic phenomena relate to the grammar of a language. The present paper makes three points in this regard: (a) it is not anomalous for there to be pragmatic phenomena encoded in the syntax and controlled by the grammar; (b) it is not anomalous for there to be pragmatic phenomena encoded in the syntax which show little or no grammatical control; and in general, (c) for pragmatic phenomena encoded in the syntax, grammatical control can be present in different degrees and in different ways