Commitment and Sentence Type Christine Gunlogson University of Rochester
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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. On the other hand, though frequently characterized as ‘echo questions’, declarative questions do not necessarily ‘echo’ preceding content in the discourse. They can be used to question unuttered presuppositions, as in (5), or to present what the Speaker takes to be consequences of (someone else’s) preceding statement or action, without echoing, as in (6): (5) Amy: Maria’s husband was at the party. Ben: a. Is Maria married? b. Maria’s married? c. (#)Maria’s married. (6) Amy: Jon has to leave early. Ben: a. Will he miss the party then? b. He’ll miss the party then? c. He’ll miss the party then. They can even be used discourse-initially, as in (7), provided the context plus content meet certain conditions (to be discussed in Section 3): (7) Amy enters the room, and Ben sees her for the first time that day. a. Did you get a haircut? b. You got a haircut? c. You got a haircut. What is the story behind this rather odd set of distributional possibilities and prohibitions? As a start, it seems natural to assume that declarative form is responsible for the biasing effect demonstrated by (3). Given that rising declaratives seem to be more question-like than falling ones, it is equally natural to suppose that rising intonation plays a role in facilitating interpretation of a declarative as questioning. The origin of the restriction exemplified in (4), however, is not so clear. A further issue raised by the data is the standard for what counts as a ‘question’. Falling declaratives pattern with rising ones in all the examples except (5), but where felicitous, seem intuitively to have a different flavor. Is it the case that only rising declaratives can function as questions, and how is that to be decided? Under the account offered here, declaratives are characterized as expressing ‘commitment’ in terms laid out in Section 2.1. The expression of commitment is naturally suited to assertive uses, but it can be adapted to questioning uses under the right conditions. The need for the context to provide such conditions, I suggest, underlies the restrictions on use exemplified by (4), and helps make sense of the circumstances under which declarative questions are felicitous. One significant challenge for the account, and for any account that associates declaratives with commitment or something like it, is reconciling the expression of commitment with the function of questioning, which seems to involve suspension of commitment. Given that rising declaratives function more readily as questions than falling ones, it’s natural to think that rising intonation somehow tempers the commitment, making questioning possible. The problem is to implement that idea in a way that yields the precise patterns of use observed. Recent analyses that take this sort of approach include Poschmann, this volume (rise expresses ‘tentativeness’), Nilsenova 2006 (rise associated with ‘uncertainty’), Bartels 1997 (‘lack of commitment’). The analysis of Gunlogson 2003, which Poschmann aptly dubs ‘attributive’, addresses the issue differently: the claim is that a rising tune designates the commitment as belonging to the addressee, a falling tune to the speaker. The context is ‘biased’ due to the addressee’s commitment while the speaker can remain uncommitted. The puzzling restriction illustrated by (4) was realized as the Contextual Bias Condition, which required that the addressee be mutually understood as committed to the content of the rising declarative prior to its utterance; only then, with an addressee recognized as already in possession of the content, could the declarative be taken as a question. Poschmann criticizes the Contextual Bias Condition on the grounds that it is not fulfilled in many felicitous uses of declarative questions. I find I must agree with the criticism. The condition is too strong. However, the distributional restriction that motivated it, exemplified by (4), remains unaddressed by Poschmann’s and other accounts. Why is it awkward to use a declarative question in a ‘stand-alone’ setting, where it is not responsive to a preceding utterance, as in (4)? What properties of the situation in (7) are responsible for the felicity of the declaratives, despite the absence of a preceding utterance? In this paper I will address those questions in an attempt to clarify the nature of restrictions on declarative questions. To do this I will be revisiting key examples from the 2003 analysis and reconsidering their implications, inspired in part by Poschmann’s insightful observations. I will concentrate on the domain of what I will call stand-alone declarative questions, those that are either discourse-initial, like (7), or whose content is not directly related to the content of a preceding utterance. The discussion of the data is set within the outline of an analysis that differs substantially from that of Gunlogson 2003 while maintaining the same general shape: I maintain that declaratives are not natural questions, that rising intonation does not directly indicate questionhood or an attitude associated with questioning, and that the contextual restrictions observed follow from the need for the context to supply elements crucial for interpretation as a question. The paper is organized as follows. I begin with the treatment of discourse commitment, its association with declaratives, and a characterization of contextual bias resulting from commitment. This remains the cornerstone of the analysis. In 2.3 I introduce the notion of being a source for a commitment and the related notion of a dependent commitment. These concepts are used throughout the discussion of stand-alone questions in Section 3 in formulating data generalizations, in establishing a criterion for ‘questions’, and in hypothesizing about the effect of the rise. In a departure from Gunlogson 2003, where rising intonation on a declarative signals the addressee’s commitment rather than the speaker’s, here I assume that, in the usual case, commitment is associated with the speaker offering the declarative, rising or falling. Falling intonation is assumed to be unmarked. 2 Declaratives and commitment 2.1 The contextual effect of declaratives I begin with the basic idea of a discourse commitment slate (following Hamblin 1971), a set of propositions representing the positions taken by an agent (i.e., participant) in the discourse. I assume a possible-world semantics in which a proposition is construed as a set of worlds, those worlds in which it is true. Using such a framework, the content of a commitment slate can also be described in terms of possible worlds: it is that set of worlds in which all of the listed propositions are true. Let us call this the commitment set (cs) of an agent. The commitment set is similar to Stalnaker’s (1978) notion of a context set, with the significant difference that commitment sets are relativized to individuals. The commitment set for each individual can be obtained by intersecting all of the propositions (i.e., all the sets of worlds) on that individual’s slate. Or, alternatively and equivalently, the commitment set can be taken as the basic representation, the same kind of thing as a proposition: (8) csa,n,d = { w ∈ W: all discourse commitments of agent a at timepoint n in discourse d are true in w } I will adopt the commitment set approach consistently for formal definitions, although it remains convenient at times to speak in terms of ‘adding commitments’. Note that adding a new commitment corresponds to eliminating worlds from the commitment set, the worlds in which the new proposition is not true. Since an agent’s discourse state (as characterized by the commitment set) changes over the course of the conversation, the cs is always relative to a particular point in the discourse, represented as n above. We can represent the overall state of the discourse at a particular time, or the discourse context, with a tuple collecting the individual commitment sets, as shown in (9) (where C stands for ‘context’): (9) Cn,d = < csa, csb… > For simplicity I will assume just two agents throughout. Adding a discourse commitment to a proposition φ can be represented as an operation restricting an individual cs so that it contains only ‘φ-worlds’, i.e., worlds in which φ holds.