Spelling out the obvious

Abstract

In Danckaert (2014), the Latin particlequidemwas analysed as a marker of emphatic affirmative polarity. Building on this proposal, this paper elaborates on the pragmatic properties of this element. I argue thatquidemis not a neutral but a so-called “presuppositional” polarity marker, which confirms a proposition which (i) is already part of the common ground but (ii) was not overtly spelled out in the (immediately) preceding context. In more formal terms, I propose thatquidemgives rise to the conventional implicature that the speaker assumes that the content of his message might already be known to the addressee, or that it conveys information that the latter expects to hear or read.Quidemcan be regarded as a “lexical marker of common ground”, in the sense of Fetzer and Fischer (2007).