Commitment and 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 . (1b) is a declarative with falling , 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 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 . They can be used to question unuttered , 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 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 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 representing the positions taken by an agent (i.e., participant) in the discourse. I assume a possible-world in which a 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. Put another way, the operation will eliminate from the targeted cs all the worlds in which φ does not hold. For example, if the proposition is it’s raining in Amsterdam, the update will eliminate from cs all the worlds in which rain is not falling in Amsterdam, leaving a set of worlds that have in common the rainy conditions in Amsterdam, though they differ in other respects. This update operation corresponds to commitment, the basic meaning I propose for a root- clause declarative sentence (N.B.: declarative sentence, not assertion). Assuming that .φ represents a sentence with propositional content φ, I take the declarative operator represented by . to be a function updating a commitment set by intersecting it with φ, as just described. The effect of .φ on a cs is thus a new version of the cs, cs’, which contains only φ-worlds:

(10) cs' = cs ∩ φ

Since the function operates on an individual cs, only one agent’s cs is affected. I assume that the matter of whose cs is to be operated on is determined at time of utterance, with the default being the speaker’s. An update is expected to be consistent. That is, we do not expect the intersection operation to result in the empty set, . If it does, the dialogue (for that agent, at least) is at a standstill, since any further intersections with the cs will continue to yield only the empty set. The empty set is the outcome if an agent commits to a proposition inconsistent with previous commitments. (That is, if an agent has previously restricted the cs to ‘φ-worlds’ by committing to φ, then any intersection with worlds where φ does not hold is bound to be empty.) I assume a general rule prohibiting updates resulting in an empty cs. Making a discourse commitment so far simply involves the carrying out of the designated operation on the appropriate individual commitment set. This bookkeeping operation by itself does not seem to shed much light on the nature of commitment. But in fact there are important assumptions built into the notion of the commitment set and the type of operations it is subject to, as follows. I take it to be a defining characteristic of discourse commitments that they carry forward into the future of the discourse, constraining the choices open to the committing agent. The fundamental constraint is the requirement of consistency. If an agent has committed to a position φ at time n, say for example that Lake Superior is the largest of the Great Lakes, then that agent would (ordinarily) cause consternation if she subsequently proposes to commit to Lake Superior not being the largest Great Lake, however that is expressed. Of course, discourse agents can revise and retract, especially in light of new information, but the claim here is simply that making a discourse commitment to φ sets up a future for the discourse where taking a position inconsistent with φ is not to be expected.1 One does not simultaneously hold discourse commitments to two propositions recognized to be inconsistent with each other; when revisions are called for, at least one of the conflicting propositions must be withdrawn. The idea that discourse commitments carry forward into the future is expressed implicitly in representing an agent’s state as a structure that is operated on incrementally, without obliterating the effects of previous operations. It is perhaps easiest to think about this point in terms of adding propositions to a commitment slate. What’s important is that the operation is additive; the propositions already listed are unaffected. In commitment set terms, where the effect of adding commitments is elimination of worlds from the set, the counterpart to addition is intersection; the worlds already eliminated stay eliminated. The point here is quite simple and intuitive: a discourse commitment, once made by an agent, becomes a fixture of that agent’s state – it persists, and subsequent commitments do not (barring revision) affect its status.2 The significance of these properties of persistence and consistency is easier to appreciate through a comparison to questions, which do not normally exhibit either. A speaker who uses a declarative to claim that it rained here yesterday cannot subsequently commit to the proposition that it did not rain at the relevant location the day before, at least not without retracting the previous commitment. But a speaker who uses an interrogative to ask did it rain here yesterday? is under no such constraint, and can perfectly well accept and commit to either a positive or a negative answer (absent other complications such as preexisting contextual bias). Furthermore, once the question posed by the interrogative is resolved in the discourse, it is, in effect, superseded by its answer. Unlike commitments, questions are not inherently persistent. That is not to say that questions impose no constraints. The point at present is just that persistence and consistency characteristically pertain to commitments, not questions. As mentioned above, it is possible to view these properties as constraining mutual expectations about how the discourse will proceed, ruling out some possible discourse futures. That is the approach I will take here, although I do not provide a formal model. I will refer to accessible and inaccessible discourse futures, where an accessible future, at a particular discourse timepoint, is a contextual state that has not been ruled out as one the current discourse could develop into. An inaccessible discourse future, then, is one that is ruled out as a possible future state. To restate the fundamentals of commitment in these terms, a speaker making a discourse commitment to a proposition φ publicly rules out certain (otherwise conceivable) futures for the discourse, making them inaccessible. The futures ruled out are any discourse states in which φ is not taken as a given, in effect any states in which the speaker’s commitment

1 The rule prohibiting inconsistency can likewise be thought of as a constraint on the discourse future, an expectation of non- empty commitment sets that holds for all . 2 I’m idealizing here by ignoring psychological factors such as memory limitations, without denying that they exist and play a role in actual discourse. set contains any ¬φ worlds. The speaker is not prohibited in any absolute sense from revising his commitments later so as to reach one of the ‘ruled out’ states, but in making an explicit commitment, the speaker conventionally indicates an intention not to do so, and gives other agents grounds for believing that the speaker has such an intention (whether or not they actually do believe it). The speaker may or may not be sincere in making a commitment. That is, she may privately expect to maintain consistency with p for the remainder of the discourse, or she may not. (Perhaps, e.g., she is adopting a devil’s advocate position to encourage her interlocutor to make an argument.) If the commitment is insincere, the speaker may or may not intend the other agent(s) to recognize the insincerity, depending on her rhetorical goals. Let us consider here only cases where the commitment is sincere. There remain a number of possible motivations for making a sincere discourse commitment. The foremost motivation, perhaps, is that the speaker believes that the proposition committed to it is true, has sufficient evidence for it, and intends to inform the other agent(s), believing that they do not already have this information. But a sincere discourse commitment is also suitable for many other purposes, such as lying, disagreeing, displaying knowledgeability, etc., and can form the basis for many kinds of speech acts. Discourse commitment, as represented here, is thus a low-level notion compared to speech acts such as assertion, which are usually assumed to involve particular attitudes. To be discourse- committed is simply to have publicly registered an intention to remain consistent with the proposition committed to. If you want to communicate that p is true, committing to p is a good strategy, but I will not assume that committing to p amounts to asserting p.

2.2 Contextual bias and neutrality

Consider a discourse in which two agents openly disagree on some point. Suppose, for example, that Amy is known to believe that the Apollo 11 astronauts actually landed on the moon, while Ben has argued that they did not, claiming that the televised event was a hoax, staged somewhere on earth. Let ψ stand for the proposition expressed by The Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon. Clearly ψ is not a mutual commitment of Amy and Ben, since Amy and Ben are in disagreement on this point (assuming Ben’s position entails ¬ψ). Of course ¬ψ is not mutually held either, since Amy’s position is in conflict with it. Neither ψ nor ¬ψ can easily become a mutually held commitment in this context; either Amy or Ben would have to revise their position, retracting the current commitment and making a new one. Let us call this sort of situation one in which both ψ and ¬ψ are controversial with respect to the context. Relevant definitions are given in (11)-(14) below.

Status of a proposition φ with respect to a discourse context C: (11) φ is a commitment in C of an agent a iff csa is not empty and csa ⊆ φ. (12) φ is a joint commitment in C iff both agents have a commitment to φ. (13) φ is resolved in C iff either φ or ¬φ is a joint commitment; otherwise, φ is unresolved in C. (14) φ is controversial in C iff ¬φ is a commitment of at least one agent, φ is unresolved in C, and C is not empty.

A second, and more directly relevant, type of situation in which ψ is a public commitment without being a mutual one is the following. Suppose Amy has taken the same position as above, making a commitment to ψ (i.e., the astronauts landed on the moon). Consider the state of the discourse before Ben makes any response indicating agreement or disagreement (i.e., neither ψ nor ¬ψ is a commitment of Ben). ψ is not a joint commitment in this situation, though it may become one without further ado if Ben were to indicate acceptance. ¬ψ is not a joint commitment, either, but its status is different from that of ψ. While ψ just needs ratification by Ben to become mutual, ¬ψ is not eligible as a joint commitment at all, given that Amy has already expressed commitment to ψ. In an obvious way the context is biased toward ψ; only ψ can be admitted as a joint commitment without requiring (non-monotonic) revision. This simple and intuitive notion of contextual bias is what I will build upon in accounting for the bias of declaratives. The relevant definitions are given in (15)-(16):

(15) C is biased toward φ iff ¬φ is controversial in C and φ is not controversial in C. (16) C is neutral with respect to φ iff neither φ nor ¬φ is controversial in C.

Contextual bias exists if mutual agreement on φ is possible (without revision) while mutual agreement on ¬φ is ruled out due to an existing commitment to φ by at least one discourse agent. If the context is in a neutral state with respect to φ, then mutual agreement on either φ or ¬φ is possible in principle. A declarative, according to the proposal of the previous section, has the effect of updating an agent’s commitment set, with the result that at least that agent has a commitment to the content of the declarative. It follows, given the definitions in this section, that use of a declarative cannot result in a context that is neutral with respect to the propositional content of the declarative. This is what we need to account for the inappropriateness of declaratives in situations requiring neutrality, like (3) above and the additional examples given in 3 below. Nothing has been said so far to distinguish the effects of rising vs. falling declaratives. This is an advantage given that both sorts fail to be neutral. The difference in their effects remains to be explained.

2.3 Sources for commitments

The proposal so far is that ordinarily, a speaker using a declarative sentence makes a discourse commitment to its content, with the effect of updating her commitment set in the manner outlined above and ensuring a non-neutral context. But declarative utterances are not the only way to make discourse commitments; commitments can arise in other ways as well, and need not correspond to an explicit utterance. For example, an agent will ordinarily be implicitly committed to entailments, presuppositions, and (non-cancelled) implicatures of her explicit commitments. Moreover, the usual sort of background knowledge and assumptions agents bring to the discourse will, in a factual discourse at least, be implicit discourse commitments. In a broader sense, anything an agent is prepared to treat as true for the purposes of the discourse [check Stalnaker, is that a quote? XX] will qualify as a commitment. In effect, ‘treating as true’ a given proposition amounts to allowing that proposition to constrain possible discourse futures through consistency requirements and persistence; if the agents understand the discourse to be constrained in those ways by the factual background, then those constraints qualify as commitments. I won’t have much to say here about the range of possibilities for implicit commitments, but there is one kind of implicit commitment I want to draw attention to: the process of accepting information based on another agent’s contribution, or as I will refer to it, testimony by another agent. The negotiation of who plays the role of information provider and who the recipient will be an important factor in considering how declarative questions work later. Consider the mechanisms by which a proposition contributed by one agent can become a joint commitment through acceptance by other agents. Here is a simple case:

(17) Amy: The server’s down. Ben: Oh. (I didn’t know that.)

In this example, Amy informs Ben that the server is down. Ben’s response (Oh) suggests that this is indeed news (Oh XX ) as far as Ben is concerned. Ben’s utterance acknowledges receipt of new information, an acknowledgment that becomes more explicit with the follow-up claiming prior ignorance. The implication is that Ben is taking the server’s failure as an established fact, based on Amy’s testimony to that effect. Let us provisionally call Amy the source for the proposition that the server is down. By hypothesis, Amy is explicitly committed to this proposition by virtue of offering it declaratively. No part of Ben’s response can be singled out as explicitly committing Ben in the same way, yet unless Ben subsequently goes on to indicate non-acceptance in some fashion, Ben does seem to be committed. There is a somewhat surprising dearth of simple linguistic devices dedicated to accepting new information from another. As far as I know, there is no single particle in English that explicitly and unambiguously signals acceptance of a novel proposition on the basis of another’s testimony. (While oh can serve this purpose, as it does above, its range is broad and it does not have to be interpreted as registering a reaction to propositional content; thus, an utterance such as Oh, I knew that is possible.) The affirmative particle yes might seem to be a candidate for the role, but it actually does something quite different. As a response to a preceding statement, yes does not simply indicate agreement or acceptance.3 Rather, it signals that the responder is affirming the stated content based on his own judgment, independent of the testimony just offered. Thus yes is odd when combined with a claim not to know, as in (18a), but fine with I know in (18b).

(18) Amy: The server’s down. Ben: a. #Yes, I didn’t know that. b. Yes, I know/it is.

In this example Amy has offered information about the server, presumably with the assumption that Ben isn’t, or at least might not be, be in possession of it. Ben’s response indicates that he had already acquired the information before Amy’s utterance, from some other evidence (quite possibly the testimony of some third person). In light of (18) it is tempting to suggest that yes indicates the responder’s prior knowledge. But prior knowledge is not quite the right characterization, as the between (19) and (20) shows:

[Amy and Ben are standing on the shore, watching a sailboat go by]

3 Throughout this paper, where I use yes as a diagnostic, I assume it is uttered with falling intonation. A full study of yes would of course consider other contours as well. (19) Amy: That’s a ketch. (20) Amy: That’s a beautiful boat. Ben: Ben: a. Oh a. #Oh b. #Yes, I didn’t know that b. #Yes, I didn’t know that c. Yes, I know c. #Yes, I know/I knew that d. Yes, it is d. Yes, it is

In both cases Amy and Ben are in a position to offer assessments of the boat they’re watching. The factual classification of the boat as a particular type patterns just like (17)-(18) above; yes indicates that Ben was already familiar with the term ketch and its applicability to the boat under discussion. However, in (20), yes is compatible with the affirmation of the judgment of beauty in (d), but not with the claim of knowledge in (c). Moreover, the response of oh is strange in (20a), contrasting with (19a), where oh is fine. Amy’s evaluative statement in the situation in (20) calls for Ben’s independent assessment, rather than the simple acceptance of testimony that oh would suggest. (It is important to the effects in (20) that Amy and Ben have equal access to the object whose beauty they are judging; it is possible for an agent to accept testimony about such judgments in other circumstances.) Based on these patterns, I will take yes as a response to a statement to indicate that the responder is in a position to affirm the content independently, i.e., does not rely on preceding statements in vouching for the correctness or accuracy of the content.4 To use the term introduced above, yes indicates that the speaker is a source for the relevant information. It is time for a working definition of that term:

(21) An agent a is a source for a proposition φ in a discourse d at point n iff: a. a is committed to φ at n; and b. It is mutually understood that a’s commitment to φ in d does not crucially depend on another agent’s testimony that φ in d

Notice that sourcehood is local to a particular discourse. As mentioned above, it is perfectly possible for Ben to be a source for φ in a conversation with Amy even though Ben gained his knowledge from the testimony of another agent in an earlier discourse. It is part of the definition above that being a source for φ requires being committed to φ. The reverse does not hold: being committed to φ does not require being a source for φ. Returning to example (17), where Ben has learned from Amy that the server is down, Amy qualifies as source and Ben does not. Thus Ben in accepting Amy’s statement (implicitly) undertakes a commitment he is not source for. It will be useful to have a term for Ben’s state as well; let us say Ben has a dependent commitment to φ in this situation:

(22) An agent a has a dependent commitment to a proposition φ in a discourse d at point n iff: a. a is committed to φ at n; and

4 This does not rule out the possibility that the preceding statement sparked the process leading to the responder’s affirmation. The responder might never have considered the matter in the absence of the original utterance, and thus would not have reached the conclusion that he did. In that sense he might owe to the original utterance the inspiration for the thinking behind the affirmation. My claim concerns a narrower sense in which the responder’s affirmation can be made independently of the content of the preceding statement, assuming the topic has been raised. b. it is mutually understood that a is not a source for φ in d [that is, a’s commitment to φ in d crucially depends on another agent’s testimony that φ in d]

The joint commitment arising from the exchange in (17) thus is a configuration with Amy as source, Ben as dependently committed. It seems reasonable to expect, on general grounds, that a discourse commitment will always be supported by at least one source (a requirement that can perhaps be framed as a generalization of Grice’s Quality maxim, in particular the subclause Do not say that for which you lack sufficient evidence, though I will not attempt that here). I therefore adopt the assumption in (23) throughout the paper:

(23) For all φ such that φ is a discourse commitment of any agent a in a discourse d at n, there is at least one agent a’ such that a’ is a source for φ in d at n.

The configuration just discussed (one agent as source, one dependently committed) meets the criterion. Another way for Amy and Ben to arrive at joint commitment is if both are independent sources for the same proposition. This is typically the case when an agent responds to a statement with yes, as in (18b) above; both Amy and Ben are understood to be sources, possibly but not necessarily relying on the same evidence. In addition, certain predicates involving evaluation against a subjective standard, such as beautiful, seem to require in the situation in (20) that each agent be an independent source for their own judgment. It follows from (23) that in a situation where only one agent has a particular commitment, that agent must be the source for φ. (Note that a and a’ in (23) are not required to be distinct.) Thus, when an agent introduces a commitment into a context where there has been no testimony for its content by other agents, then the source is assumed to be the introducing agent, unless there are indications to the contrary. This point will become quite important in Section 3. In the long run (23) is too restrictive. There are additional possibilities that it does not allow for. Consider a situation where Amy is a source for φ, Ben a source for φ  ψ, and each accepts the testimony of the other. It seems they are entitled to conclude that ψ, even though neither agent is independently a source for ψ. Although there is much more to be said on this topic, and a logic of ‘sourcehood’ is clearly called for, (23) will be adequate for the purposes of this paper . There is no direct relationship between being a source and being in possession of the truth. Suppose Ben disagrees with Amy about the boat:

[Amy and Ben are standing on the shore, watching a sailboat go by] (24) Amy: That’s a ketch. Ben: It is not. Ketches have two masts.

If every commitment needs a source, as we have been assuming, it must be the case that Amy is the source for his position, and Ben is the source for hers. Moreover, assuming they are observing Quality, Amy and Ben each believe their claim is true, and believe their supporting evidence to be sufficient. They cannot both be correct. Nevertheless, their status as independent sources is unaffected. Being a source in the sense defined here does not require being correct. Nor does it require having enough or the right kind of evidence (although pragmatic reasoning about availability of evidence can be important in interpretation, as we will see in Section Erreur ! Source du renvoi introuvable.). It doesn’t require that other agents accept the content offered or that they judge the agent involved to be reliable. It simply requires (giving the appearance of) taking a position arrived at on independent grounds, whether or not other agents in the discourse have taken the same position. As we have seen, dependency can be signaled by the type of reaction to another agent’s statement (e.g., Oh, I didn’t know that). Importantly for some of the examples to be discussed in 3, non-linguistic contextual factors can also lead to inferences about potential sourcehood/dependency of agents in the discourse. These factors include background and general knowledge. For example, in conversations involving Amy and Ben, possible futures in which Ben is a source for the proposition that Amy feels cold can be eliminated on general grounds (under ordinary circumstances), together with futures where Amy is dependent with respect to the same proposition. Specifics of a particular discourse situation can figure in. For example, if Amy and Ben are both seated in a room such that Amy has a view of the hallway and Ben does not, Amy will be recognized as a more plausible source for information about whether the boss is approaching than Ben; thus, Ben is dependent with respect to that information. The relationship between the agents is also significant. If Amy and Ben come into the conversation mutually knowing that Ben has much more expertise than Amy about, say, wine, then futures can be ruled out where Amy acts as source for facts about wine and/or Ben is dependent. In the next section I will use the notions of source and dependent commitment to sketch a informal proposal for the effect of polar interrogatives, paralleling the effect of commitment for declaratives.

3 Stand-alone declarative questions

3.1 Contexts that work and contexts that don’t

This section will explore contextual restrictions on the use of declaratives as questions when they are not ‘echoes’ of or otherwise based on a preceding utterance. The central observation is that declaratives cannot readily be used as questions ‘out of the blue’, with no particular context, as interrogatives can be. I will first support that claim, then examine the ways in which the context can be modified to allow declarative questions. Recall that two kinds of restrictions were illustrated in Section 1: the unsuitability of declarative questions in contexts required to be neutral, as seen originally in example (3) and further illustrated in (25) below; and what I characterized as the stronger prohibition seen in (4) and additional examples throughout this section.

(25) [at a committee hearing] a. Are you a member of the Communist party? b. #You’re a member of the Communist party? c. #You’re a member of the Communist party.

The restriction against declarative questions in neutral contexts is amenable to an analysis based on the treatment of contextual bias in Section 2.2. It is thus worth considering whether the second restriction can be reduced to the first. I will show that it cannot. It is not too surprising to find that other forms of “biased” questions, such as the negative polar interrogative in (25a) and the tag question in (25b), are, like declaratives, inappropriate in circumstances requiring neutrality:

(26) [cf. (25)] a. #Aren’t you a member of the Communist party? b. #You’re a member of the Communist party, aren’t you? (27) [cf. (3)] a. #Haven’t you been convicted of a felony? b. #You’ve been convicted of a felony, haven’t you?

I will not have anything to say here about the analysis of the latter biased interrogatives, but as we will see shortly, they provide a useful diagnostic. Now let us turn to sentences initiating a discourse or topic introduction. The pattern here is apparently similar to the bias cases. The interrogative (28a) can be used to strike up a conversation with a stranger about his dog, while the declaratives (28b-c) cannot. (29a) can be uttered as a query without preceding discussion of hockey, but not (29b) or (29c).

(28) [to passerby walking a dog] Pardon me, but… a. Is that a Weimaraner? b. #That’s a Weimaraner? c. #That’s a Weimaraner.

(29) [out-of-town visitor to local host] a. Does Rochester have a pro hockey team? b. #Rochester has a pro hockey team? c. # Rochester has a pro hockey team.

Unlike (25), these contexts do not seem to require a show of neutrality from the speaker. In confirmation of this point, observe that negative polar interrogatives and tag questions are fine in the same situations:

(30) [to passerby walking a dog] Pardon me, but… a. Isn’t that a Weimaraner? b. That’s a Weimaraner, isn’t it?

(31) [out-of-town visitor to local host] a. Doesn’t Rochester have a pro hockey team? b. Rochester has a pro hockey team, doesn’t it?

Bias per se is evidently not the problem here. (30)- (31) show that a felicitous biased question does not necessarily impose any particular requirements on the common ground. There needn’t be any evidence supporting the questioner’s bias in the context. We would expect a rational questioner in (30)- (31) to have some reason for holding the position suggested by the question; the point is that the questioner’s evidence can perfectly well be, and remain, private.5 Thus the infelicity of the declaratives in (28)- (29) cannot be attributed to preconditions on use of biased forms in general. Rather, there is something going on with declaratives in particular that rules out their use as questions in these contexts; or put differently, these contexts fail to provide some ingredient(s) prerequisite for a successful declarative question. To get a sense of what is required, compare the contexts of the infelicitous examples in (32- (33) to the variants in (34)-(35), where the declaratives are acceptable:

(32) Robin is sitting in a windowless computer room with no information about current weather conditions when another person enters. Robin says to the newcomer: a. Is it raining? b. #It’s raining? c. #It’s raining.

(33) Laura and Max have just left a movie and are discussing it. Laura interjects: a. Are you hungry? (Let’s get something to eat.) b. #You’re hungry? c. #You’re hungry.

[cf. (32)] (34) Robin is sitting, as before, in a windowless computer room when another person enters. The newcomer is wearing a wet raincoat and boots. Robin says: a. Is it raining? b. It’s raining? c. (I see that/So/Oh) It’s raining.

[cf. (33)] (35) In the middle of Laura and Max’s discussion, Max’s stomach rumbles audibly, and Laura hears it. Laura interjects: a. Are you hungry? Let’s get something to eat. b. You’re hungry? Let’s get something to eat. c. You’re hungry. Let’s get something to eat.

The shift in acceptability seems to be due to the availability of evidence in the discourse context suggesting the proposition expressed by the declarative is true – wet raingear in (34), the noisy digestive system in (35). Why should such evidence make a difference? Looking at these situations more closely, notice first that the contextual evidence plays different roles for speaker and addressee. Strictly speaking, it does not even constitute ‘evidence’ for the addressee, at least

5 Indeed, it is hard to make sense of the intention behind even the positive interrogative in Erreur ! Source du renvoi introuvable.a) without such an assumption about the speaker’s suspicions. Asking a polar question in these circumstances rather than a wh- question (What kind of dog is that?) is not a very efficient strategy if the questioner lacks a hypothesis about the answer. While a yes reponse would immediately resolve the issue, a no is relatively useless, eliminating only one of many possibilities. Assuming the speaker is adopting a sensible strategy requires assuming that she has reason to anticipate an affirmative response. Thus, a speaker can convey an expectation about the response even with the ‘neutral’ interrogative form, given the appropriate context and content. The issue is why a similar expectation – a bias toward a particular answer – cannot be conveyed more directly via a declarative question, especially when other biased question forms are possible. not evidence needed for judging the truth of the proposition expressed by the declarative. After all, in (34) the Addressee has just been outside and presumably knows whether or not it’s raining without having to reason from the state of her raincoat. The same point holds for Max’s hunger in (35). The contextual evidence in the felicitous examples does count as evidence for the speaker, who apparently relies on it to reach the conclusion put forward in the declarative. (The acceptability of the falling declarative in (34c) is improved with the markers shown in parentheses, which have the effect of suggesting that the conclusion was just formed from the evidence.) It is reasonable to expect speakers to have some evidence for what they say, i.e., to be observing Grice’s maxim of Quality. The puzzle is why the evidence in this situation has to be available in the discourse context. Why can’t the speaker offer in declarative form a hypothesis based on other, private evidence – for example, information received via a phone conversation or on-line? If private evidence sufficed, in the situations as described the declaratives should be felicitous and should generate an implicature that the speaker has relevant evidence at her disposal (as non-questioning uses of declaratives routinely do). In fact, there exist such felicitous uses of declarative questions. Consider this example from Beun (2000), where there is not a glimmer of the speaker’s evidence in the context:

(36) Amy: Schiphol Information Ben: Hello, this is G.M. I have to go to Helsinki, from Amsterdam. Can you tell me which flights leave next Sunday? Amy: Just a moment. Amy: Yes, there are several flights. One leaves at 9.10, one at 11.10, and one at 17.30. Ben: The flight takes about three hours?6

In (36), Ben has not inferred the duration of the flight from anything in the context but rather seems to have retrieved from memory an impression acquired sometime in the past. He then presents it to his more reliably informed interlocutor for verification. Similarly, in (37), a variation on (19), the rising declarative seems possible even though it’s not clear in context why Ben thinks the boat is a ketch:

[Amy and Ben are standing on the shore, watching a sailboat go by. Amy is known to be familiar with sailboats and nautical terms, Ben much less so] (37) Ben: a. Is that a ketch? b. That’s a ketch? c. #That’s a ketch.

Compare to (28) and (4), where the declaratives are infelicitous. The rising declarative above suggests that Ben has a reason for suspecting the affirmative, though he still seeks confirmation from Amy. (The interrogative suggests this as well; see fn. 5.) The name for a kind of boat is an arbitrary bit of knowledge, not deducible from the boat’s appearance (although the boat’s characteristics are of course important in deciding whether the name applies). Ben’s reasons for suspecting that the boat is a ketch thus necessarily involve his prior knowledge, the nature of

6 The question mark does not necessarily indicate rising intonation in Beun’s examples, but just indicates that the declarative functions as a question. which may remain private. The rising declarative implicates that he has such knowledge without requiring it to be displayed. The falling declarative is much harder to use in this context. It is felicitous to the extent it can be read as presenting its content for verification by Amy, but I find it difficult to get that reading (at least without appending a tag such as right?). Finally, in (38), a variation on (20), we see one of the few instances where the interrogative version is infelicitous (on the intended reading), along with the rising declarative:

[Amy and Ben are standing on the shore, watching a sailboat go by.] (38) Ben: a. #Is that a beautiful boat? 7 b. #That’s a beautiful boat? c. (#)That’s a beautiful boat.

(38a-b) do have a felicitous reading, namely where Ben is understood to be checking on Amy’s standard for beautiful boats (or some other external standard), something like Is that what you would call ‘beautiful’? That reading requires more contextual background than is provided in (38), however.8 More significant for present purposes is the fact that (38a-b) lack readings parallel to those for (37a-b). Clearly this is related to the nature of the in each case: judgments of beauty are subjective in a way that applying a taxonomic term is not, and as noted in 2.3, the former seem to require agents to be independent sources in the particular type of situation exemplified. Still, that does not explain why (38a-b) cannot be used to elicit Amy’s independent judgment about whether the boat is beautiful, with (38b) conveying in addition that Ben is (independently) inclined to think so. I will discuss this point further in the next section and propose an explanation. As for the falling declarative in (38c), it is perfectly felicitous as a statement of Ben’s judgment. Intuitively, it seems rather clearly not to be a question here, though it may have the effect of prompting Amy to contribute her own assessment. To sum up the observations in this section, we have seen several distinct sorts of examples that can be classified as follows:

i. (28)-(29), where both rising and falling declaratives are infelicitous ii. (32)-(35), where declaratives are felicitous just in case there is evidence supporting the content (from the speaker’s perspective) available in the discourse context. iii. (36)-(37), where use of a rising declarative is felicitous and does not require evidence in the discourse context, but rather implicates that the speaker has such (possibly private) evidence. iv. (38), where all three forms lack interpretations as questions

In the next section, I will link these effects to the concepts of source and dependency introduced earlier.

3.2 The importance of being evident

One property of all the situations in which declaratives work as questions (as well as some of the situations where they do not) is that the addressee is clearly better positioned than the

7 The fact that this sentence has an exclamative reading is intriguing, but I must ignore that reading here. 8 Refer to H&W on high-rise ‘is this reilevant’ interpretation for RD? speaker to render a verdict on the truth of the proposition, and both parties are aware of that. If the addressee’s response is to deny rather than affirm the declarative content, the speaker is in no position to argue the point, though she may reasonably request an explanation for any disparity between appearances and reality. E.g., in (34), if the newcomer says that it’s not in fact raining outside, Robin can hardly insist that it is, but both parties are likely to feel something more needs to be said about the misleading impression created by the dripping raincoat and boots. In the rather different circumstances of (36), where Amy’s job is to provide travel information, Amy can be regarded as intrinsically authoritative with respect to his domain of expertise, at least relative to travelers such as Ben. A similar observation can be made about the setup in (37). Translating this into the terminology introduced earlier, we can identify the addressee as a potential source for either the content in question or its :

(39) An agent a is authoritative with respect to φ iff it is mutually understood that: a. in any accessible state where a is committed to φ, a is a source for φ; and b. in any accessible state where a is committed to ¬φ, a is a source for ¬φ

The observation is that, by virtue of the discourse situation and the relative positions of speaker and addressee, the addressee in the felicitous examples under discussion is recognized as authoritative with respect to the propositional content. It is not too surprising to find that examples of questioning involve a less knowledgeable speaker seeking confirmation from a more knowledgeable addressee. After all, a question is canonically addressed to an agent thought capable of answering it by an agent who doesn’t know, or isn’t certain of, the answer. With interrogative uses, however, it isn’t normally required that this knowledge differential be exhibited in the discourse context before the question can be felicitously posed. The use of the interrogative itself will lead to inferences about relative knowledgeability of speaker and addressee. The relative permissiveness of the interrogative form is demonstrated by its felicity in almost all the examples discussed in the previous section. By contrast, declarative questions do seem to require, as a precondition for felicitous use, that the authoritative position of the addressee be firmly established in the discourse context, not merely a plausible assumption. Consider (28), repeated below, in this light:

(28) [to passerby walking a dog] Pardon me, but… a. Is that a Weimaraner? b. #That’s a Weimaraner? c. #That’s a Weimaraner.

From the speaker’s point of view, it’s reasonable to assume that someone walking what appears to be a purebred dog will be knowledgeable about its breed. But that assumption is by no means a certainty. It’s not difficult to come up with a scenario where the addressee is ignorant. Suppose, for example, the dogwalker is housesitting for the dog’s owner, and although not hostile to dogs, takes no interest in learning or remembering their breeds. Either way, the internal state of the addressee – knowing or not knowing the breed – is not inferable from anything in the context. Since the speaker and addressee are not acquainted, they cannot draw on what they know about each other from past exchanges either. The interrogative is fine in this circumstance. Its use suggests that the speaker is assuming (perhaps wrongly) that the addressee is knowledgeable. The absence of any contextual evidence of the addressee’s knowledge state (with respect to the dog’s breed) does not affect the felicity of the interrogative. For the declaratives, it is crucial: the knowledgeability of the addressee must be mutually recognizable in the discourse context. This claim is further supported by the felicity of the rising declarative in (37), which is quite similar in key respects to (28) but stipulates an authoritative addressee. Turning to the next set of examples, we can see that mutual recognition of the addressee’s knowledgeability, while necessary, is not sufficient to license a declarative question. In (32)- (35), it is inherent in each situation that the addressee can safely be assumed to possess the information that is sought. In both (32) and (34), the assumption of knowledgeability rests on the recognition that the addressee has just been outside directly experiencing the weather; in (33) and (35), that Max is well qualified to decide whether he’s hungry or not. Notice that these situations and accompanying assumptions are quite different in nature from (28). Like names for types of sailboats, the name of a dog breed is a bit of knowledge that simply has to be learned. Nothing about the experience of perceiving a dog is going to allow you to deduce the name of its breed. In (32)-(35), by contrast, the issues at stake are such that the addressee’s direct experience imparts the authority to resolve them. I return to this point shortly. Given that the addressee is authoritative in all of (32)-(35), what is the explanation for the contrasts in felicity of the declaratives? For this piece I will turn to the bias associated with declaratives. Recall that declaratives, by hypothesis, express commitment. By using a declarative as a stand-alone question, the speaker opens the door to biasing the context toward its content. (I am being somewhat vague here because the interactions of intonation with commitment have not yet been sorted out.) Presumably there is some reason for the speaker to favor the chosen content over its contrary. She must have some suspicion, and hence some (possibly weak) evidence, that the propositional content of the declarative is true. This inference – that the speaker has some foundation for the bias expressed -- I take to accompany all successful uses of declarative questions in the stand-alone category. And I offer this as the explanation for the observation that stand-alone questions, unlike the ‘echo’ variety, can only be used to verify, not to challenge or convey skepticism. Whose position could be challenged? The addressee has not committed either way; the speaker, if skeptical, would have no reason for putting forward the biased form. Returning to the contrast in (32)-(35), I suggest that what goes wrong in the infelicitous cases is that it is not plausible, according to what is mutually known, that the speaker has sufficient evidence to justify introducing a bias. To see the importance of the mutual knowledge clause, suppose the speaker does have access to evidence, but through a private channel, unknown to the addressee. For example, say the speaker in (32) has access to views from a webcam mounted on the exterior of the building, and the addressee is unaware of the webcam’s existence. It seems to me that this assumption of private evidence does not improve (32) in the least. However, if we assume that the existence of the webcam, and the speaker’s access to it, are mutually known, then I find the declaratives start to sound less anomalous. Requiring that it be merely plausible that the speaker has access to relevant evidence may seem too weak in light of (32)-(35), which seem to demonstrate that the evidence concerning the addressee state must be available in the discourse context. But consider (36) and (37), which allow a rising declarative without the presence of evidence supporting the speaker’s bias. The apparent divergence between (32)-(35) on the one hand and (36)- (37) on the other stems, I believe, from the nature of what could plausibly constitute relevant evidence motivating a bias for the speaker in each case. The scenarios of (32)-(35) portray situations where the speaker’s access to evidence cannot be taken for granted, in one situation because there are no windows, in the other because Max’s sensation of hunger, if present, is inherently Max’s. The speaker’s accessibility to evidence in the discourse situation matters because the issues in (32)-(35) concern what is the case right now, at the time of utterance. Evidence that it rained yesterday is not particularly relevant to the issue of whether it’s raining right here, right now; the same goes for Max’s hunger. Because of this immediacy, any evidence supporting the speaker’s bias must have become available to her very close to the utterance time and place. In effect, she must have formed the bias in the discourse situation. That is just what is implausible from the addressee’s point of view in (32)-(33), and more plausible in the situations with supporting evidence in (34)- (35). In other words, the acceptability of the declarative correlates with the plausibility of the assumption by the addressee that the speaker has relevant evidence. (The infelicitous declaratives can ultimately, I suspect, be understood as violating Quality, but that would take some further development that I will not undertake here.) Under the story just told there is no general requirement that the speaker’s evidence be available in the discourse context. Rather, what is generally required for felicity of a declarative is just that it be plausible – from the addressee’s point of view – that the speaker has some basis for her choice. The situations in (32)-(35) are special in that the plausibility requirement, the discourse situation, and the content of the questions work together to effectively require that the speaker’s evidence be part of the discourse situation. To summarize so far, I have identified two contextual requirements that must be met for a declarative utterance to be eligible for interpretation as a question:

An utterance of a declarative with content φ can be interpreted as a question only if, in the context of utterance, both (40) and (41) hold: (40) The addressee is authoritative with respect to φ – that is, mutually recognized as a source for either φ or ¬φ (41) It is plausible according to what is mutually known that the speaker has some basis for proposing φ over ¬φ

(40) and (41) are given as necessary, not sufficient, conditions, and we do not yet have a clear idea of what ‘interpreted as a question’ means. But the above requirements do suffice to rule out most of the examples where both rising and falling declaratives are infelicitous. (28) – the dog example – fails to meet 0), as does (4); the infelicity of the declaratives in (29) is similar. In (32)- (33), the problem is a violation of (41). The final example of this sort remaining is (38), where all three forms seemed to fail as questions. This failure does not appear to result from a straightforward violation of 0) or (41). For one thing, 0)-(41) are requirements for declarative questions, and thus shed no light on the infelicity of the interrogative in (38). To discuss the application of 0)-(41) to the declaratives in (38), I will need to make some assumptions about how the predicate beautiful works. First, I will take as a given what was suggested by the diagnostics with yes in 2.3, that an agent who commits to a judgment regarding beauty in the situation of (20)/(38) necessarily does so as a source. Second, I assume that being a source for such a judgment does not involve the same sort of evidence relevant to resolving matters of fact, the kind that we have been concerned with in most of the examples so far. Though there’s no doubt much to be said on this topic, I am simply going to assume that in the situation as portrayed, where both agents are gazing on the object to be judged, each is equipped to be authoritative with respect to its beauty. By assumption, then, 0) is satisfied. The minimal requirement of (41) is met as well, since proposing φ over ¬φ comes down to personal aesthetic sense for which no further justification is needed. What goes wrong, then, with (38)? To address this I propose an additional contextual requirement, this one applying to interrogative as well as declarative questions:

An utterance of a sentence with content φ can be interpreted as a question only if (42) holds in the context of utterance: (42) It is plausible according to what is mutually known that the speaker does not intend to be identified as a source for φ

0) puts a limit on how strong the speaker’s perceived basis for inclining toward φ (required by (41)) can be. It is formulated as a condition on the speaker’s state because, given 0), the problem cannot be the authoritativeness of the addressee. If the speaker is necessarily authoritative, as we are assuming for the situation of (38), the requirement in 0) cannot be met. The infelicity of both declaratives and interrogative in (38) follows. But 0) itself stands in need of an explanation. Also in need of an explanation is the fact that 0) must apply to interrogative uses (otherwise the infelicity of (38a) does not follow), while 0)-(41) must not (otherwise the felicity of interrogatives in numerous contexts where declaratives are unacceptable is problematic). I touch on these issues again XX The combined effect of 0)-0) will be to ensure that, in cases where declarative questions are possible, the addressee is mutually regarded as better positioned than the speaker to testify that φ. That is so because the addressee must be authoritative, while the speaker cannot be. At the same time, the speaker’s bias toward φ, manifested by the choice of a declarative form, must be plausibly motivated. Thus we see that the contexts allowing interpretation of declaratives as questions are quite restricted in very specific ways.

3.3 The rise and fall of declaratives

So far I have assumed, implicitly, that ‘declarative questions’ form a class to which, in principle, uses of both rising and falling declaratives can belong. In this section I will advance a hypothesis about the differences between them and how the intonational component and contextual factors interact in each case. In doing so I will arrive at a proposal for what counts as a ‘question’ under which the rising declarative uses we have seen, but not the falling ones, will qualify. This accords with the intuition that rising declaratives are more natural questions than falling ones. More concretely, we have contrasts in acceptability of rising vs. falling declaratives in some of Section 3.1’s examples to make sense of, and I return to those in XX I begin with the observation that the utterances of rising declaratives exemplified throughout this paper, where felicitous, characteristically function as confirming questions – the speaker offers a proposal anticipating endorsement by a knowledgeable addressee. This effect can be seen as a result of requirements 0)-(41) above. If the speaker has reason to believe φ over ¬φ , and takes the addressee to be knowledgeable, then the speaker has reason to believe that the addressee knows that φ. Falling declaratives can also be addressed to a knowledgeable addressee with the expectation of confirmation, and in this sense can be question-like. Like rising declarative questions, and unlike prototypical assertive uses, the falling declarative uses we have been examining are addressed to an agent who is capable in principle of providing the same kind of confirming (or disconfirming) response anticipated by a question in interrogative or rising declarative form. That is, a falling declarative as well as a rising one can elicit a yes/no response from a knowledgeable addressee, in situations where 0)-(41) are satisfied. This is quite clear in an example like (7), repeated below, where the falling declarative as well as the other two is consistent with an intention to obtain Amy’s confirmation (or not):

(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.

Despite their similarity with respect to the addressee’s status, the rising and falling declaratives in (7) do not seem equivalent in effect. I locate the key difference between them in the speaker’s status, as follows. I assume that falling intonation is the unmarked case, contributing no meaningful element. Under the account given here, a falling declarative thus simply expresses commitment, doing so by virtue of its declarative form. In the subset of contexts considered above where it is felicitous, a falling declarative has the usual declarative effect of committing the speaker. It will also follow, in the contexts we are concerned with, that the speaker is committed as a source. Recall from 2.3 the assumption that every commitment must have a source; if only one agent holds a position at a particular point in time in the discourse, then that agent must be source for it. Declaratives as standalone questions fit that description. There has been no essential preceding testimony by the addressee in these examples. If the commitment is to have a source prior to the addressee’s response, it must be the speaker. Taking (7) to illustrate, the hypothesis is that Ben commits to the proposition that Amy has had a haircut. Since Amy hasn’t committed herself either way, Ben must be the source for his own testimony. This seems reasonable. Though Amy is certainly authoritative with respect to whether she got a haircut recently (under normal circumstances), Ben clearly has relevant evidence, too – his assessment of Amy’s appearance, hair in particular. Ben’s evidence is admittedly indirect compared to the addressee’s. But that does not mean it is insufficient for Ben to reach a conclusion. It might be thought that Ben’s claim to sourcehood would be strengthened if there are factors tending to increase his reliability – he’s known to be a sharp observer of hairstyles, sees Amy frequently, etc. Such considerations certainly bear on whether he is likely to be correct in his surmise. But when it comes to making explicit commitments, the linguistically-relevant notion of source that I am proposing here is not particularly sensitive to such qualifications or lack of them, or to the likelihood that the corresponding commitment accurately reflects reality. The variety of forms available in (7) illustrates nicely the element of speaker choice in presentation of content. The conservative choice is the interrogative, which avoids any risk of a mistaken commitment. The falling declarative is comparatively bold, since revision will be required if Ben is mistaken. Either form may be used with exactly the same evidence available to the speaker, and with the same degree of expectation that the addressee will respond affirmatively. Within the limits of plausibility, the choice of whether to present oneself as source, or not, is the speaker’s – not a direct function of the quality or quantity of evidence. According to 0), in the contexts where a declarative is acceptable, the addressee already knows whether φ is true or not, and the speaker and addressee are mutually aware of that knowledge. Therefore Ben’s commitment to φ in (7c) cannot be interpreted as an attempt to inform the addressee of something she does not know, the prototypical function of a (falling) declarative. But Ben’s utterance is not without a point. It remains possible that φ is informative with respect to what is mutually known. Before Ben’s utterance in (7), the status of the proposition that Amy recently got a haircut as an implicit joint commitment is uncertain – even if Ben is quite sure before speaking that Amy has indeed gotten her hair cut. The matter does not depend entirely on Ben. For the fact of her haircut to be mutually recognized, Amy must realize that Ben has noticed it. Ben’s utterance in any of the three forms will have the effect of notifying Amy that Ben has so noticed, or (in case he’s wrong about the haircut) at least has perceived something different about her appearance; it also paves the way for an explicit joint commitment, provided Amy responds affirmatively. What sets the falling declarative case apart, I suggest, is the nature of the joint commitment anticipated. A joint commitment may have more than one agent independently serving as a source, a configuration that requires each such agent to have made their commitment without relying on testimony of other agents in the discourse. Ben’s use of a falling declarative in (7c), which by hypothesis identifies him as a source, contributes half of that configuration; Amy’s response, if affirmative, will establish her as the other half, committed as a source to the same proposition. The falling declarative addressed to a knowledgeable addressee thus serves as a grounding move, making explicit the speaker’s commitment to a proposition that otherwise might not be mutually recognized as shared knowledge. Where falling declaratives work best in the above examples, they are uttered in response to some non-linguistic event in the discourse situation – someone entering the room, a noise, etc. The utterance draws attention to aspects of the event that have led to the speaker forming a conclusion. The kind of markers that seem to improve the falling declarative in XX work along the same lines, contributing to the sense of a conclusion just formed in light of evidence that just became available.9 I suggest that this immediacy, together with the relative positions of speaker and addressee, facilitates the interpretation of the falling declarative as a grounding move. No such precipitating event occurs in (36)-(37), and thus the motivation for the speaker’s falling declarative remains obscure. To sum up, I propose that falling declaratives have the effect of committing the speaker to φ, with no additional effects from falling intonation. In contributing the initial testimony that φ holds, the speaker portrays herself as a source. In contexts that satisfy 0), where they cannot be understood as performing the prototypical function of offering the addressee new information, falling declaratives will be felicitous to the extent an alternative intention can be discerned. A plausible intention, I have suggested, is that of clarifying the status of the content in the context, with the expectation of making explicit, with the addressee’s participation, a joint commitment that otherwise would remain implicit or not achieve joint commitment status at all.

9 I speculate that these markers are not needed to the same extent in XX (though they can occur) because the latter are statements about the personal state of the addressee, with 2nd person subjects. Thus there is no danger of a misguided inference that the speaker bases her testimony on direct experience or takes the addressee to be uninformed, even when the speaker is acting as a source. In the case of it’s raining, where the utterance is intended to elicit the addressee’s ratification of φ, the necessary inferences are more complex. The addressee must be able to realize that the speaker has sufficient evidence to be a source, that the speaker recognizes that the addressee is a source, and perhaps that the speaker recognizes her own evidence as indirect compared to the addressee’s.

The case of the rising declarative is more complex. Before moving on, I want to prepare the ground by pointing out some aspects of the proposal so far. I am about to suggest that in the rising declarative case, the speaker is identified as not being a source. That may seem to be at odds with the conclusions just reached about falling declaratives, given that I assume both sorts express commitment. In tracing the effects of a fall or a rise under the current hypothesis, it is important to keep in mind that the identification of the utterer of a declarative as source, or not, arises from the use of a particular form with particular content in a context with particular properties. I assume that the attribution of sourcehood or dependency involves pragmatic inferences drawing on all of those features; it does not inhere in declarative form or falling intonation, nor, I will claim, in rising intonation. (Interrogatives, however, are another matter; I speculate on their effects in XX.) This indirect relationship between declaratives and source attribution is quite different from the direct connection I posit between declaratives and commitment. It follows that, in principle, in appropriate contexts, with appropriate content, falling declaratives can conceivably be used without their speakers being regarded as sources, and rising declaratives with speakers as sources. Beyond pointing out the possibility, I will have nothing to say about such uses here. As for effects of rising declaratives in the contexts at hand, I propose that, where felicitous, they present their content as a dependent commitment of the speaker. Recall from 2.3 that an agent who has a dependent commitment is not a source but crucially relies on the testimony of another agent who is a source. In the case of a rising declarative used as a stand-alone question, I suggest, the source (i.e., the addressee) has not yet given the necessary testimony, and the rising declarative has the effect of an invitation to do so. The rising intonation clearly plays a central role in this effect. As just discussed, however, I do not want to claim that rising intonation directly signals the dependent status of the commitment. Rather, I propose that the contribution of the rise is quite general in nature, with a more particular interpretation taking shape under the influence of contextual factors. The role of the contextual requirements outlined in the previous section can be understood in this light; they provide the context needed for narrowing down the general interpretation to the specific questioning effect. I will proceed by revisiting the conditions with this hypothesis in mind. The conditions are repeated below for reference:

An utterance of a declarative with content φ can be interpreted as a question only if, in the context of utterance, both (40) and (41) hold: (40) The addressee is authoritative with respect to φ – that is, mutually recognized as a source for either φ or ¬φ (41) It is plausible according to what is mutually known that the speaker has some basis for proposing φ over ¬φ

An utterance of a sentence with content φ can be interpreted as a question only if (42) holds in the context of utterance: (42) It is plausible according to what is mutually known that the speaker does not intend to be identified as a source for φ

As noted in connection with falling declaratives, 0), by requiring that the addressee be understood as knowledgeable, rules out any interpretation of the speaker as intending to inform the addressee of something not known to her. The fact that this condition holds for rising as well as falling declaratives lends credence to the idea that rising intonation does not directly indicate something like questionhood; if it did, a rising declarative would have the capability, like an interrogative, to implicate (the speaker’s belief in) the addressee’s knowledgeability, rather than requiring the context to supply it. As mentioned earlier, the presumption of addressee knowledgeability is canonically associated with questioning. The requirement that this presumption be evident in context suggests that this component of questioning cannot be derived from the contribution of the rise but rather is one of the factors influencing its interpretation. The condition in (41) was characterized earlier as arising from the bias introduced by a declarative; it must be possible for the addressee to reasonably assume that the speaker has some foundation for the bias. I have nothing to add to that here, though I will comment later on interaction of the rise with the biasing effect of the declarative. XX (42) has to do with the insufficiency of the speaker’s knowledge, another factor canonically associated with questioning. This condition, unlike the first two, seems to apply to polar interrogatives as well as declaratives. The relevant example is repeated below:

[Amy and Ben are standing on the shore, watching a sailboat go by.] (38) Ben: a. #Is that a beautiful boat? b. #That’s a beautiful boat? c. (#)That’s a beautiful boat.

Recall that by assumption, in the situation in (38), Amy and Ben are by necessity equally well qualified to be a source in judging the boat’s pulchritude. (42), on the other hand, together with 0), has the result of demanding disparity between the states of the speaker and addressee. This demand cannot be met for (38b-c), which are thus infelicitous as questions. But the infelicity of the interrogative, which is not subject to 0) as a precondition, is still unexpected. It appears that a speaker who is known to be a source cannot felicitously use an interrogative to solicit a response from another known source, at least not in the case where their status as sources has a shared basis. This is an interesting and revealing limitation on interrogative use. I speculate that the essential effect of a polar interrogative, corresponding to commitment for declaratives, is to present the speaker as not being a source for the content. If this is the case, then (42) is relevant for interrogatives because it expresses the minimal requirement that the interrogative be used in contexts compatible with its effect; the situation in (38) is not one of those. Although I believe this to be a promising line, I am not going to take it any further with respect to interrogatives in this paper. However, it does provide some background motivation for a move to be made on more practical grounds. I propose to adapt (42) as a definitional criterion for whether an utterance counts as a (polar) question, as follows:

(43) An utterance of a sentence with content φ by an agent a is a question in a context C only if in the updated context C’ resulting from the utterance, it is mutually understood that the speaker is not a source for φ

(43) is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. Other conditions may or may not apply as well, depending on the nature of the form and content uttered. For declarative questions, the context must also satisfy the preconditions 0)-(41). Failure to meet (43) will not necessarily result in infelicity; but an utterance that does not satisfy (43) will not be considered a felicitous question. For illustration we need look no further than the falling declaratives already discussed. I argued above that in contexts where 0)-(41) are satisfied, the speaker of a (standalone) falling declarative is necessarily understood as a source. According to (43), then, such uses do not qualify as questions. (7c), for instance (You got a haircut.), is not a question. There is nothing in particular riding on the terminology here. But there is an implicit claim about the existence of a significant difference between the effects of rising and falling declaratives in these contexts. I return now to the rising declarative case to lay out this claim. I am proposing that the rise on a declarative, in the contexts under discussion, has the specific effect of counteracting the inference that the speaker is a source for the content – an inference that does go through in the falling declarative case. By hypothesis, the specific effect produced by the rise comes about through interaction of a much more general meaning with contextual factors. The general contribution of the rise, I suggest, is to indicate that the effect of the utterance – its update of the context – is to be carried out only if some discourse condition is met, with the identity of the condition determined in context.

(44) A final rise marks an utterance as contingent: the context update it represents is to be carried out only if some contextually-relevant discourse condition is met, antecedently or subsequently.

I assume that the discourse condition may have been met just prior to the rising utterance, in which case the rise will serve to acknowledge a relation between them. Or, as in the case at hand, the utterance may be an attempt to bring about the satisfaction of the condition. The rise is not limited, on this approach, to marking questions or question-like moves. Conceivably it could mark declarative utterances used to convey new information, with relevant discourse conditions such as achieving consensus (XX citation) or receiving addressee acknowledgment. Note that satisfaction of the condition is characterized in Erreur ! Source du renvoi introuvable.) as necessary but not sufficient for the move to go through. There is obviously much more to be said about this hypothesis and its motivation and implementation, but in this paper I will concentrate on describing how it is supposed to play out for declarative questions. The result I am aiming for in the case of standalone rising declarative questions is the following. The speaker’s commitment to the declarative content is marked as contingent by the rise. The relevant discourse condition upon which the speaker’s commitment depends is understood to be the (subsequent) ratification of the content by the addressee as source. The speaker’s commitment, if ultimately made, will be understood to be dependent, i.e., the speaker will not be viewed as a source. Deriving that result in a principled way is an ongoing project. Here I will simply comment on the interaction of condition 0) and the rise. I assume that the mutually recognized authoritativeness of the addressee demanded by 0) is a central factor in resolving the nature of the contingency expressed by the rise. The context contributes the identification of the addressee as source, whether that source ultimately affirms or denies the content. That identification is a crucial prerequisite for interpretation of the speaker as not being a source; somebody has to be one, by assumption, and casting the addressee in that role raises the possibility that the speaker is not. The rise, I suggests, is influential in the realization of that possibility, i.e., in ruling out the speaker as a source. It accomplishes that indirectly, through marking the speaker’s commitment as standing in need of some discourse eventuality to go through. The authoritative status of the addressee becomes more salient in light of the placeholder for a condition the rise supplies. That is, if it’s possible that the speaker does not intend to be a source and therefore needs the addressee to be one, and the rise independently indicates that the speaker’s commitment is contingent on something, it’s straightforward to connect the dots and conclude that what the speaker’s commitment depends upon is the addressee’s commitment as source. The rise thus has the indirect effect of casting the speaker’s commitment as dependent, thereby qualifying it as a question, per (43). To summarize, the proposal is that a rise on a declarative facilitates interpretation as a question, but it does so indirectly, by presenting the speaker’s commitment as contingent. Achieving the questioning effect requires a context where the addressee is known to be authoritative with respect to the content; the speaker can then be regarded as not being a source, a property that is characterized as essential for an utterance to count as a question. A falling declarative addressed to an authoritative addressee is not necessarily infelicitous, but since (in the cases under discussion) the speaker’s commitment is made before any testimony by the addressee and is not marked as contingent, the speaker must be understood as a source. Falling declaratives in these circumstances thus do not qualify as questions.

4 Conclusion

In this paper I have offered a proposal that models the notion of ‘commitment’ and connects it with the use of declarative sentences in English. The influence of declarative form, and the commitment it expresses, carries over into the non-canonical use of declaratives as questions. I have drawn attention to the reality of restrictions on declaratives as ‘stand-alone’ questions and argued for characterizing those restrictions in a particular way. The restrictions stem, I suggest, from the need for the context to fill in features necessary for interpretation of an utterance as a ‘question’. Along the way I introduced a characterization of sources for commitments, used in reasoning about contextual requirements and the nature of questioning. Finally, I provided the outlines of an account of rising intonation under which its very general contribution combines with context and content to produce the particular effect of questioning. There is clearly much more to be said about all of the topics touched upon here – commitment, declarative questions, rising intonation, interrogatives – and much to be spelled out and elaborated. In closing I will comment on one major area that has not been addressed here at all – the category of declarative ‘echo questions’ (broadly construed), where the declarative repeats, recasts, extends, or draws conclusions from an immediately preceding utterance by another party. The account I have sketched here can be generalized to cover most echo questions as well. A significant difference between such questions and the stand-alone variety is that the former allow for a broader range of speaker attitudes. Echo questions can be used both in accepting the preceding claim by the addressee and in challenging it, with the implication in the latter case that the speaker has reason to doubt the accuracy of the addressee’s testimony. Stand- alone questions, as noted in Section 3, lack the potential for challenging or conveying skepticism; they only offer hypotheses that the speaker has reason to believe are true. This difference can be traced to the fact that in the echo category, by definition, the addressee10 speaks first and is thus established as a source for the content prior to the ‘echo’. Also by virtue of the original utterance, the addressee is responsible for introducing a contextual

10 The terms are a bit confusing here – the addressee with respect to the echo question is the speaker of the echoed utterance. bias toward the proposition expressed. A version of condition (41) will apply to the addressee’s original utterance, giving rise to the inference that the addressee has some basis for the commitment and resulting contextual bias. But now that the addressee bears that responsibility, no such inference will necessarily arise for the speaker – the ‘echoer’. The details would require considerably more discussion, but the basic result is clear: the attitude attributable to the speaker in the echo question case is less constrained than for stand-alone questions.

Bartels, Christine 1997. Towards a Compositional Interpretation of English Statement and Question Intonation. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Beun, R.J. 2000. Context and Form: Declarative or Interrogative, that is the Question. In Bunt, H. and W. Black, eds., Abduction, Belief and Context in Dialogue. Studies in Computational . Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hirschberg, J. and G. Ward 1992. The influence of pitch range, duration, amplitude and spectral features on the interpretation of the rise-fall-rise intonation contour in English. Journal of Phonetics 20:241-251. Noh, Eun-Ju 1998. Echo Questions: Metarepresentation and Pragmatic Enrichment. Linguistics and Philosophy 21:603-628. Stalnaker, R. 1978. Assertion. In Φ. Cole (ed.) Pragmatics: and Semantics, Volume 9. New York: Academic Press.

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