DOCSLIB.ORG

Constraining Interpretation: Sentence Final Particles in Japanese

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Constraining Interpretation: Sentence Final Particles in Japanese University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Open Access Dissertations 5-13-2011 Constraining Interpretation: Sentence Final Particles in Japanese Christopher M. Davis University of Massachusetts Amherst, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations Part of the Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons Recommended Citation Davis, Christopher M., "Constraining Interpretation: Sentence Final Particles in Japanese" (2011). Open Access Dissertations. 397. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/397 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CONSTRAINING INTERPRETATION: SENTENCE FINAL PARTICLES IN JAPANESE A Dissertation Presented by CHRISTOPHER DAVIS Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2011 Department of Linguistics c Copyright by Christopher Davis 2011 All Rights Reserved CONSTRAINING INTERPRETATION: SENTENCE FINAL PARTICLES IN JAPANESE A Dissertation Presented by CHRISTOPHER DAVIS Approved as to style and content by: Christopher Potts, Chair Angelika Kratzer, Member John Kingston, Member Adrian Staub, Member Margaret Speas, Department Head Department of Linguistics ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I remember reading the acknowledgements in Rajesh Bhatt's dissertation (Bhatt 1999)1 during my first year at UMass. He opens by saying that he had figured the acknowledgments would be the easiest and funnest part of the writing process, leading to procrastination and a last-minute writing task. I was amused. And now here I am, in the same position. I'll stick to tradition, and begin with the committee members. I would most definitely not be the linguist I am today were it not for Chris Potts. He has been involved with this work from the very beginning. He has been not only an enthusiastic mentor, but an inspired and inspiring research collaborator. From an early stage in my grad student career, he encouraged me to think like a researcher, and more importantly, to work like one. I am sincerely grateful for Chris's time, his expertise, and his encouragement. Thanks, Chris! Angelika Kratzer has also been involved with this project from the very beginning. Her incisive criticism of the very first instantiation of this work led to a complete overhaul of the formal system, along with a rethinking of how data on pragmatic particles should be approached. I'm afraid that in both respects the present effort still falls short, but I am confident that the end result is much, much better than it would have been without Angelika's input. Thanks, Angelika! John Kingston provided detailed comments and enlightening discussion about various aspects of this work, from its earliest version to the final draft. Probably because the material is far from his primary field of interest, he has always provided 1A citation in my acknowledgments? And now a footnote? Are the grad school margins enforcers going to let this slide? iv an excellent \outside eye" on the issues involved. Many of his comments brought to light fundamental questions that I had overlooked, and his perspective on the data has always kept me from making unwarranted assumptions. Thanks, John! Adrian Staub, the \outside member" of the committee, has been anything but. In our meetings, I learned that (as befits an experimental psychologist) he has an im- pressive ability to translate even baroque theoretical issues into practically testable hypotheses. Adrian's input on the quantitative analysis of the corpus data was in- credibly helpful; Adrian's statistical expertise helped me get new perspectives on this data, and also helped me link it back to the semantic and pragmatic issues that are the focus of the dissertation. Thanks, Adrian! My transition to life as a graduate student at UMass was made much easier by my wonderful cohort of classmates: Maria Biezma, Amy Rose Deal, Annahita Farudi, Masashi Hashimoto, Karen Jesney, Kathryn Pruitt, and Aynat Rubinstein. Special thanks are due to Karen and Annahita, who roomed with me for our first four years here. My time at UMass has been greatly enriched by all the other students in the department as well; you all know who you are. Thanks especially to Mike Key, who has been a constant friend these six years. Finally, I want to thank Yangsook Park, for her friendship, humor, and for kicking me into gear with a friendly aja aja when I needed it. Over the course of this project, I have benefited from discussion of the Japanese data with many wonderful friends and colleagues. The following people acted as in- formants and as co-explorers of the phenomena described in this dissertation: Yurie Hara, Masashi Hashimoto, Misato Hiraga, Erumi Honda, Shigeto Kawahara, Eric McCready, Terue Miyashita, Shoichi Takahashi, Yoko Takahashi, Yukinori Takubo, and Satoshi Tomioka. The help of Terue Miyashita and Masashi Hashimoto has been absolutely crucial to the last months of this project, as I cleared up empirical un- certainties, refined earlier hypotheses, and made recordings. I want to give special v thanks to Erumi Honda for supporting me throughout the dissertation writing pro- cess, in more ways than I can begin to say. She is a tireless informant and a dear friend. I couldn't have done this without you, Erumi. The last few years have been marked by frequent visits to Japan. I want to thank everyone there for their hospitality. I am especially grateful for the friendship of my sanshin teachers Shunya Hata and Miki Ogawa, as well as my fellow sanshin-ky¯oshitsu students. They welcomed me in from my very first day in Osaka, and my life is much richer for their friendship. I look forward to seeing you all again very soon. Finally, I want to thank my family. Words are not enough to express the gratitude I feel to my parents. Suffice it to say that they have always allowed me to go my own way. Thank you, Mom and Dad. To my sister and new brother-in-law I am also very thankful. Please know that y'all will always be in my heart. As I conclude these acknowledgments, I am forced to acknowledge that my time with this project has concluded. I send it out into the world, warts and all. Whatever is good in it is due in large part to the help and support of the people I mentioned above. The warts are all mine. vi ABSTRACT CONSTRAINING INTERPRETATION: SENTENCE FINAL PARTICLES IN JAPANESE MAY 2011 CHRISTOPHER DAVIS B.A., UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Christopher Potts This dissertation is concerned with how pragmatic particles interact with senten- tial force and with general pragmatic constraints to derive optimal dynamic inter- pretations. The primary empirical focus of the dissertation is the Japanese sentence final particle yo and its intonational associates. These right-peripheral elements are argued to interact semantically with sentential force in specifying the set of contextual transitions compatible with an utterance. In this way, they semantically constrain the pragmatic interpretation of the utterances in which they occur. These conven- tional constraints on interpretation are wedded with general pragmatic constraints which provide a further filter on the road to optimal interpretation. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................. iv ABSTRACT ......................................................... vii LIST OF TABLES ................................................... xii LIST OF FIGURES..................................................xiii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: FORCE, PARTICLES, AND PRAGMATICS ................................................. 1 1.1 Sentential Force . .1 1.2 The Common Ground and Context Change . .8 1.3 Pragmatic Particles . 13 1.3.1 The Japanese Right Periphery . 15 1.3.2 Sentence Final Intonational Particles . 22 1.3.3 The Structure of the Right Periphery . 26 1.4 Extensions to the Basic Model of Context Change . 28 1.4.1 Beyond Assertion: Imperatives and Interrogatives . 29 1.4.2 Distinguishing Speaker and Addressee Commitments . 30 1.4.3 Relational CCPs . 32 1.5 Overview of the Dissertation . 37 2. DECLARATIVES WITH YO ..................................... 40 2.1 The Semantics and Pragmatics of Relational CCPs . 41 2.1.1 The Semantics of Declaratives . 41 2.1.2 CCP Pragmatics . 48 viii 2.2 The Semantics and Pragmatics of yo ............................... 55 2.2.1 Initial Observations . 55 2.2.2 The Semantics of yo: An Inclusive Locutionary Operator . 59 2.2.3 Optimal Transitions and (Non-)Monotonic Update . 63 2.2.4 Comparison with McCready (2009) . 71 2.3 Summary . 74 3. CORRECTION, ACTION, AND INTONATION .................. 76 3.1 Overview . 76 3.2 : A Guide to Action . 79 * 3.2.1 Relevance Marking . 80 3.2.2 Contextual Issues . 89 3.2.3 Semantics of ............................................ 92 3.2.4 Evidence for Optimality* . 96 3.2.5 Minimal Decision Problems . 103 3.3 : A Call for Correction . 106 + 3.3.1 Basic Data . 107 3.3.2 Semantics of ........................................... 117 3.3.3 Further Issue+ in Modeling Non-Monotonicity . 122 3.3.4 Combining Intonational Morphemes . 127 3.4 The Profile of yo in a Large Sentiment Corpus . 131 3.4.1 The Relative Frequency of yo and yo ..................... 132 3.4.2 A Tendency towards Extreme* Sentiment+ . 133 3.4.3 Sentence Final, Discourse Final . 141 3.5 Summary . 146 4. IMPERATIVES WITH YO ...................................... 147 4.1 Public Intentions and Imperative Update . 147 4.1.1 Public Intentions . 147 4.1.2 Semantics of Imperatives . 149 4.2 An Open-Agent CCP Semantics of Imperatives . 155 4.2.1 Imperatives in Japanese . 155 4.2.2 A Relational CCP Semantics of Imperatives . 158 4.2.3 Imperatives in Permission-Granting Contexts . 160 ix 4.3 and in yo-marked Imperatives .
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Intonation and Interpretation: Phonetics and Phonology
    In: Speech prosody 2002. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Speech Prosody. Edited by Bernard Bel & Isabelle Marlien. Aix-en-Provence: Laboratoire Parole et Language, Université de Provence. 2002. pp 47-57. Intonation and interpretation: phonetics and phonology Carlos Gussenhoven Centre for Language Studies University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands [email protected] by no means always the case. Language change may create ‘unnatural’, arbitrary forms [5]. This response to the problem Abstract of the partially paralinguistic nature of intonation contrasts with earlier ones in which either an almost exclusively non- Intonational meaning is located in two components of linguistic viewpoint was adopted [6], or an exclusively language, the phonetic implementation and the intonational linguistic viewpoint (e.g. [2]), or in which the two aspects are grammar. The phonetic implementation is widely used for the reconciled with each other in a gradient conception of their expression of universal meanings that derive from ‘biological difference (e.g. [7, p. 128],[8]). Below, I explain the notion codes’, meaning dimensions based on aspects of the of a biological code (section 2.0), and discuss each of the production process of pitch variation. Three codes are three codes in a separate section. identified, Ohala’s Frequency Code, the Effort Code and the 1.1. Three biological codes Production Code. In each case, ‘informational’ meanings (which relate to the message) are identified, while for the first The question arises what the expalnation is the of the nature two codes also ‘affective’ meanings (relating to the state of of the universal paralignuistic meanings.
    [Show full text]
  • Inquisitive Semantics OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, //, Spi
    OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, //, SPi Inquisitive Semantics OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, //, SPi OXFORD SURVEYS IN SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS general editors: Chris Barker, NewYorkUniversity, and Christopher Kennedy, University of Chicago advisory editors: Kent Bach, San Francisco State University; Jack Hoeksema, University of Groningen;LaurenceR.Horn,Yale University; William Ladusaw, University of California Santa Cruz; Richard Larson, Stony Brook University; Beth Levin, Stanford University;MarkSteedman,University of Edinburgh; Anna Szabolcsi, New York University; Gregory Ward, Northwestern University published Modality Paul Portner Reference Barbara Abbott Intonation and Meaning Daniel Büring Questions Veneeta Dayal Mood Paul Portner Inquisitive Semantics Ivano Ciardelli, Jeroen Groenendijk, and Floris Roelofsen in preparation Aspect Hana Filip Lexical Pragmatics Laurence R. Horn Conversational Implicature Yan Huang OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, //, SPi Inquisitive Semantics IVANO CIARDELLI, JEROEN GROENENDIJK, AND FLORIS ROELOFSEN 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, //, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Ivano Ciardelli, Jeroen Groenendijk, and Floris Roelofsen The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in Impression: Some rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, for commercial purposes, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted bylaw,bylicenceorundertermsagreedwiththeappropriatereprographics rights organization. This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms ofa Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives .
    [Show full text]
  • RISES ALL the WAY UP: the INTERPRETATION of PROSODY, DISCOURSE ATTITUDES and DIALOGUE STRUCTURE Catherine Lai a DISSERTATION In
    RISES ALL THE WAY UP: THE INTERPRETATION OF PROSODY, DISCOURSE ATTITUDES AND DIALOGUE STRUCTURE Catherine Lai A DISSERTATION in Linguistics Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2012 Supervisor of Dissertation: Jiahong Yuan, Assistant Professor of Linguistics Graduate Group Chair: Eugene Buckley, Associate Professor of Linguistics Dissertation Committee: Jiahong Yuan, Assistant Professor of Linguistics Mark Liberman, Trustee Professor of Phonetics Florian Schwarz, Assistant Professor of Linguistics ii Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my advisor Jiahong Yuan. I came to Penn with a somewhat vague idea of doing something in the realm of semantics and pragmatics, but it didn't take long to get hooked on phonetics with Jiahong as a teacher. I've benefitted enormously from his mentoring through the years on several other projects in addition to dissertation work. The fact that I've been able to do a dissertation right on the intersection of semantics, pragmatics, and phonetics is a testament to his open mindedness, intellectual vigor and unfailing practical support. Being at Penn has also allowed me the privilege of having Mark Liberman and Florian Schwarz on my dissertation committee. Mark never fails to amaze me with not only the breadth and depth of his knowledge on all areas of language research, but also his astounding clarity of thought. Mark's classes were critical for my developing the technical notions that have enabled me to investigate the prosody-meaning problem in a quantitative way. Florian's help was crucial in getting the semantic and pragmatic parts of this project on the right track.
    [Show full text]
  • 324 10 2 Pragmatics I New Shorter
    Speaker’s Meaning, Speech Acts, Topic and Focus, Questions Read: Portner: 24-25,190-198 LING 324 1 Sentence vs. Utterance • Sentence: a unit of language that is syntactically well-formed and can stand alone in discourse as an autonomous linguistic unit, and has a compositionally derived meaning: – A sentence consists of a subject and a predicate: S NP VP. – [[ [NP VP] ]]M,g = 1 iff [[NP]]M,g ∈ [[VP]]M,g • Utterance: The occurrence (use) of a sentence (or possibly smaller constituent that can stand alone) at a given time. • Bill: Sue is coming. Jane: Yes, Sue is coming. – Two utterances of the same sentence. Same meaning. • Bill: “I am tired.” Jane: “ I am tired, too” – Two utterances of the same sentence. Two different meanings. • Semantics studies the meaning of sentences; pragmatics studies the meaning of utterances. LING 324 2 Semantic Meaning vs. Speaker Meaning • A: Most of the people here seem pretty glum. • B: Not everybody. The man drinking champagne is happy. • A: Where? • B: That guy! (pointing) • A: He’s not drinking champagne. He’s drinking sparkling water. The only person drinking champagne is crying on the couch. See? • B: Well, what I meant was that the first guy is happy. [c.f. Donnellan 1966, Kripke 1977] LING 324 3 • The semantic (or expression) meaning of a sentence (or a smaller constituent) is its literal meaning, based on what the words individually mean and the grammar of the language. • The speaker’s meaning of a sentence is what the speaker intends to communicate by uttering it. • These often coincide, but can diverge.
    [Show full text]
  • Sentential Negativity and Polarity-Sensitive Anaphora a Hyperintensional Account
    Sentential negativity and polarity-sensitive anaphora A hyperintensional account Lisa Hofmann University of California Santa Cruz 1 Introduction This paper is concerned with an asymmetry between positive and negative sen- tences in discourse.1 The licensing of certain propositional anaphora is contin- gent on the polarity of their antecedent clause. I call them Polarity-Sensitive Anaphora (PSAs). Among these are polar additives (Klima (1964)) and polarity particles (Farkas and Bruce (2010); Roelofsen and Farkas (2015)). (1) Polar additives (2) Agreement with polarity particles a. Mary slept. a. Mary slept. (i) So did Dalia. (i) Yes, she slept. (ii) #Neither did Dalia. (ii) #No, she slept. b. Mary didn’t sleep. b. Mary didn’t sleep. (i) #So did Dalia. (i) Yes, she didn’t sleep. (ii) Neither did Dalia. (ii) No, she didn’t sleep. Polar additives are polarity-sensitive in their licensing: Positive polar ad- ditives with so are available with a positive antecedent (1-a), but not with a negative one (1-b), whereas neither shows the opposite pattern. Polarity parti- cles (PolPs) are polarity-sensitive in their interpretation. In a positive context (2-a), only yes, but not no can be used to agree with the antecedent. In the negative context, this contrast is neutralized (Ginzburg and Sag (2000); Roelof- sen and Farkas (2015)) and either polarity particle can be used to agree. These asymmetries lead me to two questions: 1. How can the polarity-sensitivity of PSAs be accounted for? 2. What renders a sentence positive/negative for the purposes of discourse and how might that be captured theoretically? 1.
    [Show full text]
  • Division of Labor in the Interpretation of Declaratives and Interrogatives∗
    Division of labor in the interpretation of declaratives and interrogatives∗ Donka F. Farkas Floris Roelofsen University of California Santa Cruz ILLC, University of Amsterdam August 2, 2016 Abstract This paper presents an account of the semantic content and conventional discourse effects of a range of sentence types in English, namely falling declaratives, polar interrogatives, and certain kinds of rising declaratives and tag interrogatives. The account aims to divide the labor between compositional semantics and conventions of use in a principled way. We argue that falling declaratives and polar interrogatives are unmarked sentence types. On our account, differences in their conventional discourse effects follow from independently motivated semantic differences combined with a single convention of use, which applies uniformly to both sentence types. As a result, the Fregean `illocutionary force operators' Assertion and Question become unnecessary. In contrast, we argue that rising declaratives and tag interrogatives are marked sentence types. On our account, their conventional discourse effects consist of the effects that are dictated by the basic convention of use that is common to all sentence types considered here, augmented with special effects that are systematically connected to their formal properties. Thus, a central feature of our approach is that it maintains a parallelism between unmarked and marked sentence types on the one hand, and basic and complex discourse effects on the other. 1 Introduction It is often assumed that the interpretation of an utterance involves at least three factors: (i) a compositional procedure which, given the lexical meaning of the words that the uttered sentence consists of and the way in which they are put together, determines the semantic content of the sentence, (ii) certain conventions of use connected to the sentence type involved (e.g.
    [Show full text]
  • Intonation and Commitment: the Case of Rising Declaratives* Deniz Rudin — [email protected] @ Norcal Sentence Types Workshop 29 Jan 2017, Near Some Redwoods
    Intonation and Commitment: The case of rising declaratives* Deniz Rudin — [email protected] @ Norcal Sentence Types Workshop 29 Jan 2017, near some redwoods 1 Setting the Stage The subject at hand: the conventional discourse effect of rising declaratives, and its re- lation to the conventional discourse effect of falling declaratives and of polar interroga- tives. (1) a. Bill owns rottweilers. b. Bill owns rottweilers? c. Does Bill own rottweilers? ▷ rising intonation marked with question marks throughout, as above ▷ today I’ll just say ‘rising intonation’ and leave it at that—though I think a fully convincing account would eventually need to engage with at least somewhat fine- grained intonational detail To get a sense of the empirical terrain, here’s three basic cases: (2) THE HAIRCUT CASE a. [Context: A is looking at her addressee, whose hair looks much shorter than yesterday.] A: You got a haircut? b. [Context: A is talking to her addressee on the phone, and is groping at random for something to talk about.] A: #You got a haircut? In the felicitous case, (2a), A has good reason to believe that p is true, and also has good reason to believe that her addressee believes it to be true. (3) THE TRINKET CASE a. [Context: A has shown B a chintzy trinket and told him that Antiques Roadshow appraised it to be worth millions.] B: This trinket is valuable? *Thanks above all to Donka Farkas, whose work inspired this project and whose guidance led it to fruition. Thanks also to my fellow students in last quarter’s sentence types seminar, and thanks in advance to this workshop’s over-the-hill attendees.
    [Show full text]
  • On the Rise and Fall of Declaratives 1 Introduction
    In Reich, Ingo et al. (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn & Bedeutung 15, pp. 1–16. Universaar – Saarland Unversity Press: Saarbrücken, Germany, 2011. On the rise and fall of declaratives Tue Trinh Luka Crnicˇ MIT MIT [email protected] [email protected] Abstract. This paper argues for a new way of thinking about semantic and pragmatic effects of particular sentence intonation patterns. The main focus of the paper is on the so-called rising declaratives, i.e. sentences that have the surface structure of a declarative sentence but are pronounced with a rising pitch contour. Rising declaratives differ from both declaratives with a falling pitch contour and questions in their pragmatic effect. Our goal is to account for this difference. We propose that rising intonation contour is syntactically realized. Its semantic import is to determine the resolution of a variable in the speech act projection, i.e. rising intonation operates on speech acts. The pragmatic effects associated with rising declaratives are shown to follow from this minimal assumption and the independently motivated tenets of speech act theory. 1 Introduction Rising declaratives are declarative sentences with a rising pitch contour, which we indicate with a question mark in the following examples. They are known to exhibit pragmatic effects distinct from those of declarative sentences with a falling pitch contour (e.g. Gunlogson 2003). Most prominently, rising declar- atives elicit a a yes/no response from the addressee, similar to polar interrog- atives. This is shown in (1) where the utterance by A is naturally followed by B’s response with yes or no.
    [Show full text]
  • The Limits of Meaning: Social Indexicality, Variation, and the Cline of Interiority
    The limits of meaning: Social indexicality, variation, and the cline of interiority Penelope Eckert Language, Volume 95, Number 4, December 2019, pp. 751-776 (Article) Published by Linguistic Society of America For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/743105 Access provided at 17 Dec 2019 23:13 GMT from Linguistic Society of America THE LIMITS OF MEANING: SOCIAL INDEXICALITY, VARIATION, AND THE CLINE OF INTERIORITY Penelope Eckert Stanford University The structural focus of linguistics has led to a static and modular treatment of meaning. View - ing language as practice allows us to transcend the boundaries of subdisciplines that deal with meaning and to integrate the social indexicality of variation into this larger system. This article presents the expression of social meaning as a continuum of decreasing reference and increasing performativity, with sociolinguistic variation at the performative extreme. The meaning potential of sociolinguistic variables in turn is based in their form and their social source, constituting a cline of ‘interiority’ from variables that index public social facts about the speaker to more inter - nal, personal affective states.* Keywords : variation, social meaning, semantics, pragmatics, iconicity, indexicality, semiotics ‘I have resisted the term sociolinguistics for many years, since it implies that there can be a successful linguistic theory or practice which is not social.’ (Labov 1972:13) 1. Introduction . Language is a social practice, a dialectic between structure and agency: structure constrains action, and action in turn reproduces structure. As Giddens (1984:2) puts it, ‘In and through their activities agents reproduce the conditions that make these activities possible’.
    [Show full text]
  • Commitment and Sentence Type Christine Gunlogson University of Rochester
    Commitment and sentence type Christine Gunlogson University of Rochester 1 Introduction Consider the three sentences in (1): (1) a. Is the server down? Polar interrogative b. The server’s down. Falling declarative c. The server’s down? Rising declarative In English, the polar interrogative in (1a) is the prototypical way to ask a yes/no question. (1b) is a declarative with falling intonation, the canonical device for making a statement. Rising intonation, indicated by the question mark in (1b), renders the declarative superficially similar in effect to a polar interrogative: (2) a. The server’s down? ≈ Is the server down? b. You ate lunch already? ≈ Did you eat lunch already? But the distribution of declaratives as questions is considerably restricted than that of interrogatives (Bartels 1997, Gunlogson 2003). For example, declaratives are not appropriate as questions in contexts where the questioner is expected to maintain neutrality, as in (3) below: (3) [in a job interview or application form] a. Have you been convicted of a felony? b. #You’ve been convicted of a felony? c. #You’ve been convicted of a felony. (3b)- (3c), unlike (3a), suggest that the questioner is confirming the felony conviction rather than inquiring about its existence. A stronger and more puzzling restriction is that declaratives cannot readily be used as questions “out of the blue”, as seen in (4). (4) [to coworker eating a piece of fruit] a. Is that a persimmon? b. #That’s a persimmon? c. #That’s a persimmon. In (4), there is nothing about the situation that requires the questioner to be neutral, so the oddness of (4b) is in need of an explanation.
    [Show full text]
  • Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge
    RESEARCH ON LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL INTERACTION, 45(1), 1–29, 2012 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0835-1813 print / 1532-7973 online DOI: 10.1080/08351813.2012.646684 FEATURED DEBATE Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge John Heritage Department of Sociology University of California at Los Angeles This article considers the role of grammatical form in the construction of social action, focusing on turns that either assert or request information. It is argued that the epistemic status of a speaker consistently takes precedence over a turn’s morphosyntactically displayed epistemic stance in the constitution of the action a turn is implementing. Insofar as asserting or requesting information is a fundamental underlying feature of many classes of social action, consideration of the (relative) epistemic statuses of the speaker and hearer are a fundamental and unavoidable element in the con- struction of social action. A range of examples illustrate patterns of convergence and divergence in the relation between epistemic status and epistemic stance. Even where an utterance is in the linguistic form of a question, and seems to be doing questioning, the latter will not be adequately accounted for by the former. For if the question form can be used for actions other than questioning, and questioning can be accomplished by linguistic forms other than questions, then a relevant problem can be posed not only about how a question does something other than questioning, but about how it does questioning; not only about how questioning is done by non-question forms, but about how it gets accomplished by question forms.
    [Show full text]
  • Inquisitive Semantics
    Inquisitive semantics Ivano Ciardelli Jeroen Groenendijk Floris Roelofsen About this document The current version of this book manuscript was created on December 9, 2016. Many of the papers referred to in the manuscript can be accessed through: www.illc.uva.nl/inquisitivesemantics/papers Finally, to become familiar with the framework presented here, one may want to try out the computational tools available at: www.illc.uva.nl/inquisitivesemantics/resources The work presented here has been made possible through financial support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the European Research Council (ERC), which we gratefully acknowledge. 2 Contents 1 Introduction5 1.1 Motivation..............................6 1.2 Outline................................ 15 1.3 Exercises............................... 15 2 Basic notions 17 2.1 The standard picture......................... 17 2.2 Information states.......................... 19 2.3 Issues................................. 21 2.4 Propositions.............................. 23 2.5 Contexts................................ 34 2.6 Summary and pointers to possible refinements........... 41 2.7 Exercises............................... 43 3 Basic operations on propositions 45 3.1 Algebraic operations......................... 46 3.2 Projection operators......................... 50 3.3 Linguistic relevance.......................... 53 3.4 Exercises............................... 54 4 A first-order inquisitive semantics 57 4.1 Logical language and models.................... 57 4.2
    [Show full text]