Corrective elaboration

This paper studies the similarities between corrections expressed by plain juxtaposition of utterances (John didn’t praise Bill. He praised Mary.) and elaborations (John praised a student. He praised Mary.) and develops a unified pragmatic account of how these discourse relations are inferred. The inference results from a combination of the exhaustivity implicatures of the individual utterances on the assumption that the discourse topic, which determines the quantification domain of exhaustivity, remains constant.