About What About: Topicality at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface

Home , Whataboutism

About What About: Topicality at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface Justin Bledin (JHU Philosophy) and Kyle Rawlins (JHU CogSci) What about questions have featured prominently in the literature on topicality. Gundel (1974/1988) proposes a what about diagnostic for topichood, where alignment with a what about question can help to identify the entity-type “pragmatic topic” of a subsequent utterance: (1) What about Archie? (Gundel, ex. 46)

a. Archie rejected the proposal. b. #It was [ARCHIE]F who rejected the proposal. What abouts have also been taken to be contrastive topic markers (Jackendoff 1972; Buring¨ 2003; Beaver et al. 2017; see (4) below), and Ebert et al. (2014) propose that what abouts introduce new discourse topics (i.e., QUDs). Taking these connections as our point of departure, the goal of this project is to contribute to the understanding of the role of both entity-style and question-style topics in semantics and pragmatics by homing in on the what about construction itself, which has yet to be analyzed in serious detail. We also offer a new linguistic perspective on “whataboutism”, a defensive rhetorical strategy associated with Soviet era propaganda but more recently employed by President Trump in many of his tweets whereby a speaker deflects criticism from an interlocutor by making a counteraccusation that asks what about some action or policy that they have taken. Part of the challenge with analyzing what about is that this construction is extremely flexible both syntactically and pragmatically: Syntactic flexibility puzzle: What about can combine with a large range of “prejacents” including DPs, APs, certain TPs, certain CPs, and more. How to account compositionally for this generality? (2)A: What color should we paint the bedroom? B: {What/How} about the same color as the living room? (DP prejacent) B0: {What/How} about green? (AP prejacent) B00: {??What/How} about we paint it green? (futurate present clausal prejacent) B000: {What/How} about if we paint it green? (if -clause prejacent) (etcetera.) Functional heterogeneity puzzle: What about moves can serve a variety of different discourse purposes. How to account for this pragmatic flexibility? Four core uses are illustrated below: (3) Suggestive use: Where should we go for dinner? {What/How} about The Brewer’s Art?

(4) Contrastive use: A: Well, what about FRED? What did HE eat? B: [FRED]CT ate the [BEANS]F. (Jackendoff, ex. 6.145) (5) Challenging use: A: Kenny G is the GOAT of saxophone. B: Umm, what about Coltrane? (6) Exclamatory use: How ‘bout {them Dodgers/that local sports team}! We argue that this flexibility owes to the dependency of what about on a prior question in discourse (the “antecedent QUD”), which delimits their inquisitive scope. We first attempt to model this QUD dependency by interpreting the antecedent as an unstructured proposition set (Hamblin 1973; Karttunen 1977; Groenendijk & Stokhof 1984; Ciardelli et al. 2019) and letting what about filter this input down to the subset consisting solely of those propositions about the prejacent denotation (the ABOUT relation is further analyzed using the theories of Lewis 1988a,b; Partee 1989): c c (7) Unstructured intepretation: what about X = {phs,ti : p ∈ QUDc∧ABOUT(p, X )} J K J K Defined only if Qc 6= hi (i.e., the QUD stack in c is nonempty). However, this unstructured analysis makes wrong empirical predictions in cases where the what about prejacent also occurs as a constituent of the antecedent QUD, such as (8) where applying (7) to B’s suggestive use seems to incorrectly predict that B re-asks A’s question rather than asking

1 whether Archie could have nominated himself, as well as cases where the antecedent is a multiple constituent question and the prejacent denotation lies in the quantificational domain of more than one wh-item, such as (9) where (7) undergenerates readings in predicting neither the interpretation “Who did Bill hit?” nor “Who hit Bill?” for A’s what about: (8)A: Who could have nominated Archie for the prize? (He’s clearly undeserving of it.) B: What about Archie? (9)A: Who hit who? B: Felix {hit/was hit by} Max. A: What about Bill? The basic problem is that the what about prejacent targets a specific wh-item in the antecedent but we cannot enforce this if the input to the what about mechanism is an unstructured set of propositions. Our solution is to adopt a structured meaning (aka. “functional”) approach to questions on which they denote “background” properties paired with quantification domains or “restrictions”: Q = hBQ,RQi (von Stechow 1991; Krifka 2001). Within this more fine-grained framework, we can say that the speaker of what about asks whether the background of the antecedent QUD is true of the prejacent denotation, which is implemented in the following (preliminary) entry where the restriction of the antecedent is contracted to the prejacent: c c (10) Structured interpretation (simple version): what about X = hBQUDc , { X }i c J K J K Defined only if Qc 6= hi and X ∈ RQUDc . J K This handles the syntactic flexibility puzzle in giving nice results for DP and non-DP prejacents:

(11) a. W hoi ti rejected the proposal? = hλxeλws.(x rejected the proposal in w), PERSONi c J W hat about Archie? = hλxeλwK s.(x rejected the proposal in w),{Archie}i J K Equivalently: Did Archie reject the proposal? (unlike Krifka 2001, we assume a structured variantJ of the singleton set analysis ofK polar interrogatives (Roberts 1996; Biezma & Rawlins 2012))

(12) a. W hat color1 should we paint the bedroom t1? = J 0 K 0 hλPhe,hs,tiiλws.Should(w)(λws.(we paint the bedroom P in w )), COLORi c 0 0 b. How about green? = hλPhe,hs,tiiλws.Should(w)(λws.(we paint P in w )), {green}i J K However, the basic structured meaning entry (10) must be further refined to accommodate multiple constituent questions, coordinated prejacents (e.g., “What about chicken or fish?”), and disjunctive antecedent QUDs, though we must omit details here. A nice bonus application of our QUD-based analysis is to cases of “whataboutism”, exhibited in many of Trump’s tweets such as the following response to allegations of collusion: (13) (Trump tweet on July 22, 2017) What about all of the Clinton ties to Russia, including Podesta Company, Uranium deal, Russian Reset, big dollar speeches, etc. We propose that such whataboutery works precisely because what about allows for substantial pragmatic flexibility in the targeted QUD—in the example (13), Trump’s what about question triggers accommodation with the implicit QUD “Which links to foreign governments influenced the presidential election?” (see Cooper & Larsson 2010; Roberts 2012; Bledin & Rawlins 2019 for more on such QUD repair). Applying our analysis (10) against this antecedent, Trump asks whether Clinton’s ties to Russia influenced the election. Note that whataboutism is most effective when directly rejecting the what about question leaves the hearer open to accusations of hypocrisy or inconsistency. It is also often combined with other tricks, such as smuggling in controversial assumptions via presuppositions of the prejacent.

2 Bibliography

David Beaver, Craige Roberts, Mandy Simons, and Judith Tonhauser. Questions under discussion: Where information structure meets projective content. Annual Review of Linguistics, 3(1):265–284, 2017. Mar´ıa Biezma and Kyle Rawlins. Responding to alternative and polar questions. Linguistics and Philosophy, 35(5):361–406, 2012. Justin Bledin and Kyle Rawlins. What If s. Semantics & Pragmatics, 12(14):1–55, 2019. Daniel Buring.¨ On D-trees, beans, and B-accents. Linguistics and Philosophy, 26(5):511–545, 2003. Ivano Ciardelli, Jeroen Groenendijk, and Floris Roelofsen. Inquisitive Semantics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019. Robin Cooper and Staffan Larsson. Accommodation and reaccommodation in dialogue. In Rainer Bauerle,¨ Uwe Reyle, and Thomas Ede Zimmermann, editors, Presuppositions and Discourse: Essays Offered to Hans Kamp, pages 101–124. Emerald Group Publishing, 2010. Christian Ebert, Cornelia Ebert, and Stefan Hinterwimmer. A uniﬁed analysis of conditionals as topics. Linguistics and Philosophy, 37(5):353–408, 2014. Jeroen Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof. Studies on the semantics of questions and the pragmatics of answers. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 1984. C. L. Hamblin. Questions in Montague English. Foundations of Language, 10(1):41–53, 1973. Lauri Karttunen. Syntax and semantics of questions. Linguistics and Philosophy, 1(1):3–44, 1977. Manfred Krifka. For a structured meaning account of questions and answers. In Caroline Fery and Wolf- gang Sternefeld, editors, Audiatur Vox Sapientia: A Festschrift for Arnim von Stechow, pages 287–319. Akademie Verlag, 2001. David Lewis. Relevant implication. Theoria, 54(3):161–174, 1988a. David Lewis. Statements partly about observation. Philosophical Papers, 17(1):1–31, 1988b. Barbara Partee. Speaker’s reply. In Allen´ Sture, editor, Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Sciences, pages 152–161. de Gruyter, 1989. Craige Roberts. Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. In Jae Hak Yoon and Andreas Kathol, editors, Papers in Semantics (Working Papers in Linguistics), volume 49. Ohio State University, 1996. Craige Roberts. Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. Semantics & Pragmatics, 5(6):1–69, 2012. Armin von Stechow. Focusing and backgrounding operators. In Werner Abraham, editor, Discourse Par- ticles: Descriptive and Theoretical Investigations on the Logical, Syntactic and Pragmatic Properties of Discourse Particles in German, pages 37–84. John Benjamins, 1991.