'Yeah, I Doubt It.' 'No, It's True.' How
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‘YEAH, I DOUBT IT.’ ‘NO, IT’S TRUE.’ HOW PARADOXICAL RESPONSES IMPACT THE COMMON GROUND by ERIN ALISA GUNTLY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Linguistics) The University of British Columbia (Vancouver) March 2021 © Erin Alisa Guntly, 2021 The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled: ‘Yeah, I doubt it.’ ‘No, it’s true.’ How paradoxical responses impact the common ground submitted by Erin Alisa Guntly in partial fulllment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics Examining Committee: Lisa Matthewson, Linguistics, UBC Supervisor Rose-Marie Déchaine, Linguistics, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Carla Hudson Kam, Linguistics, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Marcin Morzycki, Linguistics, UBC University Examiner Jessica de Villiers, English, UBC University Examiner Manfred Kria, Leibniz Center for General Linguistics, Humboldt University of Berlin External Examiner ii Abstract Speakers use paradoxical responses, such as ‘yeah, that’s not right’ and ‘no, I agree’, but the func- tion of these responses is not clear. While one use of response particles (RPs) such as ‘yeah’ and ‘no’ is to signal acceptance or rejection of at-issue content into the common ground, the linguistic content that follows these RPs in paradoxical responses suggests that ‘yeah’ is not agreeing to at- issue content, nor is ‘no’ rejecting it. This raises the question, what are these responses signalling to update the common ground? This dissertation argues that the two components of paradoxical responses, the RPs and the followup content, are selecting diferent targets. The set of targets includes not only the at-issue content, but also speaker beliefs and the questions under discussion. Testing this hypothesis, called the Response Target Hypothesis, draws on a mix of methodologies, one experimental and one rooted in corpus data. Corpora of transcribed, unscripted conversations were searched for RPs plus followup con- tent; 200 tokens for ‘yeah’ and ‘no’ were identied for a total of 400, 173 of which were paradox- ical. In addition to accepting and rejecting the at-issue content, responses which targeted speaker belief and questions under discussion were also frequent. In paradoxical responses, the followup content almost exclusively targets the at-issue content, and RPs select the additional targets. The experiment presented two-phase scripted conversations to participants: one phase using a combination of response particle and followup content, and the second phase checking if the common ground was updated by phase one. Participants were asked to rate the acceptability of the conversation afer hearing both phases. Conversations which included paradoxical responses had a likelihood of being judged ‘appropriate’ or ‘very appropriate’ similar to those conversations which included non-paradoxical responses but which varied only in the RP. In other words ‘yeah, it wasn’t’ patterened along similar lines as ‘no, it wasn’t.’ Both data streams support the hypothesis that RPs can target more than at-issue content; the results demonstate that RPs that have followup content can target speaker beliefs and questions under discussion independent of at-issue content. iii Lay Summary Speakers use paradoxical responses such as ‘yeah, I don’t think so,’ and ‘no, you’re right,’ in con- versation with surprising frequency, but what do they mean? This dissertation shows how those responses can have three functions: They can accept or reject the truth of what was said (“That’s true.’’ or “That’s not true.’’); they can accept another speaker’s belief in what was said (“I know you think that, but it’s not true.’’); and they accept or reject the topic of the discussion (“We can’t know, so let’s not discuss it.’’ or “We already know, so let’s not discuss it.’’). The dissertation uses corpus and experimental data to show that paradoxical responses can sometimes be more appropriate than non-paradoxical responses and that the content afer ‘yeah’ and ‘no’ is more important in determining the function of the response. iv Preface This dissertation is the original, unpublished work of Erin Alisa Guntly. The experiment in Chapter 4 was conducted under UBC Behavioural Research Ethics Board Certicate Number H16-03338. v Contents Abstract ......................................... iii Lay Summary ...................................... iv Preface .......................................... v Contents ......................................... vi List of Figures ...................................... xi List of Tables ....................................... xiii Acknowledgements ................................... xv Dedication ........................................ xvii 1 The research question and hypothesis ...................... 1 1.1 Introduction to paradoxical responses ...................... 1 1.2 Basic background and terminology ....................... 4 1.2.1 Semantic terms ............................. 4 1.2.2 Common ground ............................ 6 1.2.3 Conversational components ...................... 7 1.3 The Response Target Hypothesis and its core predictions . 12 1.4 Evidence to test the hypothesis .......................... 16 1.5 Preview ..................................... 17 2 Tracking information through discourse .................... 18 2.1 Before an utterance ............................... 19 2.1.1 Sources of Common Ground ...................... 19 vi 2.1.2 Context of discourse .......................... 23 2.1.3 Audience design and accomodation ................... 25 2.1.4 Modeling the state of information before the utterance . 26 2.2 The exchange, a two-step process ........................ 27 2.2.1 The assertion .............................. 29 2.2.1.1 The at-issue content ..................... 29 2.2.1.2 The question under discussion (QUD) . 31 2.2.1.3 Statements of belief ..................... 34 2.2.1.4 Modelling the utterance ................... 38 2.2.2 The response .............................. 40 2.2.2.1 Response options ...................... 43 2.2.2.2 The use of response particles . 44 RPs as anaphors and RP elipsis . 44 Response polarity ........................ 48 2.2.2.3 Adopting a view of response particles . 50 2.2.2.4 Modeling the response .................... 51 2.3 Afer the exchange ................................ 52 2.3.1 Updating the common ground ..................... 52 2.3.2 Models of discourse ........................... 56 2.3.2.1 The Table .......................... 56 2.3.2.2 Commitment Spaces ..................... 58 2.3.3 Role of memory ............................. 61 2.3.4 Modelling common ground update ................... 62 2.4 Summary .................................... 65 3 Naturally occuring data .............................. 66 3.1 Methodology .................................. 66 3.1.1 Selecting the data (corpus and “wild”) . 67 3.1.2 What was excluded from my study ................... 74 Fragmented discourse ...................... 74 Missing context ......................... 75 Broadcast genre conventions . 75 Direct questions ........................ 76 Quizzes ............................. 76 Backchanneling ......................... 77 vii Other syntactic uses ....................... 78 3.1.3 Distinguishing between agreeing and disagreeing content . 78 3.1.4 Determining the question under discussion . 83 3.1.5 Summarizing the methodology ..................... 85 3.2 An overview of the corpus data ......................... 86 3.3 Non-paradoxical responses targeting only at-issue content . 88 3.3.1 ‘Yeah’ responses accepting at-issue content . 89 3.3.1.1 Direct agreement ....................... 89 3.3.1.2 Entailing agreement ..................... 91 3.3.2 Agreeing with negative polarity ..................... 97 3.3.3 ‘No’ responses rejecting at-issue content . 100 3.4 Accepting belief and rejecting at-issue content . 102 3.5 Targeting the question under discussion (QUD) . 105 3.5.1 Accepting the QUD . 106 3.5.2 Rejecting the QUD . 110 3.5.2.1 Answer to QUD already in common ground . 110 3.5.2.2 QUD will not benet from further discussion . 112 3.6 Conclusions and Summary . 115 4 Experimental results ................................ 117 4.1 Experiment ................................... 117 4.2 Method ..................................... 119 4.2.1 Participants ............................... 119 4.2.2 Stimuli design .............................. 121 4.2.2.1 Exchange I: Establish the common ground . 123 Scalar versus nonscalar predicates . 123 Response particle and followup content responses . 124 4.2.2.2 Exchange II: Check the common ground . 125 4.2.3 Experimental Task . 126 4.2.4 Materials ................................ 127 4.2.4.1 Visual aspects of the stimuli . 127 4.2.4.2 Audio aspects of the stimuli . 131 4.2.5 Procedure ................................ 133 4.3 Results ...................................... 138 4.4 Discussion .................................... 151 viii 4.4.1 How the experimental results support the hypothesis . 151 4.4.2 Potential variables beyond the study . 152 4.4.2.1 Intonation . 152 4.4.2.2 Listener status . 153 4.5 Summary .................................... 154 5 Conclusions ..................................... 155 5.1 Overall conclusions ............................... 155 5.1.1 Comparing the data to the predictions