Exploring the Exclamative Speech Act from a Discourse Perspective
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Exclamativity in discourse Exploring the exclamative speech act from a discourse perspective Published by LOT phone: +31 30 253 6111 Trans 10 e-mail: [email protected] 3512 JK Utrecht http://www.lotschool.nl The Netherlands Cover illustration: by Nadezda Plekhanova ISBN: 978-94-6093-140-6 NUR: 616 Copyright c 2014 Anna Chernilovskaya. All rights reserved. Exclamativity in discourse Exploring the exclamative speech act from a discourse perspective Exclamativiteit in discourse Een verkenning van de exclamatieve taalhandeling vanuit een discourseperspectief (met een samenvatting in het Nederlands) Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit Utrecht op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof.dr. G.J. van der Zwaan, ingevolge het besluit van het college voor promoties in het openbaar te verdedigen op woensdag 11 juni 2014 des ochtends te 10.30 uur door Anna Chernilovskaya geboren op 6 december 1983 te Novosibirsk, Sovjet-Unie Promotor: Prof.dr. H.E. de Swart Co-promotor: Dr. R.W.F. Nouwen Contents List of Tables................................. ix Acknowledgements.............................. xi 1 Introduction1 1.1 Wh-exclamatives: between form and speech act.........1 1.1.1 The mapping between syntactic form and speech act..3 1.1.2 The mapping between semantic denotation and discourse function...........................4 1.1.3 The exclamative sentence type?..............5 1.2 Defining a speech act........................8 1.2.1 Two perspectives on speech acts.............8 1.2.2 The exclamative speech act?............... 10 1.3 Plan of the dissertation...................... 11 2 Background 15 2.1 Introduction............................. 15 2.2 Overview of background literature................ 17 2.2.1 Rett (2011)......................... 17 2.2.2 Zanuttini and Portner (2003)............... 21 2.2.3 Castroviej´oMir´o(2008).................. 24 2.3 Proposal for the what-question.................. 26 2.3.1 Preliminary proposal.................... 28 2.3.2 One or two exclamative contents?............ 29 2.3.3 Scalar and non-scalar wh-exclamatives.......... 30 2.3.4 Attitudes expressed by wh-exclamatives......... 32 2.3.5 A judge of evaluation in wh-exclamative content.... 34 2.4 Conclusion............................. 39 vi 3 Discourse properties of wh-exclamatives 43 3.1 Introduction............................. 43 3.2 Wh-exclamative content is an entailment............. 47 3.2.1 Introduction........................ 47 3.2.2 Denying the wh-exclamative content........... 48 3.2.3 Summary.......................... 50 3.3 Wh-exclamative content is not asserted............. 50 3.3.1 Introduction........................ 50 3.3.2 Challenging assertions involving speaker-privileged infor- mation............................ 53 3.3.3 Wh-exclamatives cannot be challenged directly..... 55 3.3.4 Indirect challenge markers following wh-exclamatives.. 59 3.3.5 Wh-exclamatives can be challenged by asserting the op- posite............................ 60 3.3.6 Interim summary...................... 62 3.4 How wh-exclamative content is confirmed and accepted.... 63 3.4.1 Introduction........................ 63 3.4.2 Wh-exclamative content cannot be accepted....... 68 3.4.3 Can wh-exclamative content be confirmed?....... 68 3.4.4 Summary.......................... 73 3.5 Other discourse properties of wh-exclamatives.......... 74 3.5.1 Wh-exclamatives as responses to questions....... 74 3.5.2 Wh-exclamatives can be used to introduce new information 79 3.5.3 Wh-exclamatives can be inserted into narration..... 80 3.5.4 Can wh-exclamatives be used to defend speaker's position? 81 3.5.5 Wh-exclamatives do not require reaction from the addressee 81 3.5.6 Summary.......................... 82 3.6 Discourse properties of four wh-exclamative contents...... 82 3.7 Conclusion............................. 85 4 A model of context 89 4.1 Introduction............................. 89 4.2 Farkas and Bruce (2009)'s model of context........... 91 4.2.1 Common ground...................... 92 4.2.2 Discourse commitments.................. 94 4.2.3 Question under discussion................. 96 4.2.4 Future common grounds.................. 98 4.3 Farkas and Bruce (2009)'s proposal for assertion........ 100 4.3.1 The context-change effect of the assertion speech-act op- erator............................ 100 4.3.2 Denying asserted content................. 101 4.3.3 Accepting and confirming asserted content........ 101 4.3.4 Directly challenging asserted content........... 105 4.4 Assertions with non-asserted contents.............. 107 4.4.1 The proposal for assertions with non-asserted content. 107 vii 4.4.2 Direct Common Ground update............. 109 4.4.3 Explaining discourse properties of appositive content.. 110 4.4.4 Indirect challenge...................... 111 4.5 Conclusion............................. 113 5 The context-change effect of wh-exclamatives 115 5.1 Introduction............................. 115 5.2 Proposal for the how-question................... 116 5.3 Derivation of discourse properties of wh-exclamatives...... 120 5.3.1 Speaker deniability of wh-exclamative content...... 121 5.3.2 Direct challengeability of wh-exclamative content.... 121 5.3.3 Indirect challengeability of wh-exclamative content.. 122 5.3.4 Acceptance of wh-exclamative content.......... 123 5.3.5 Confirmation of wh-exclamative content......... 123 5.3.6 Other discourse properties of wh-exclamatives...... 125 5.3.7 Summary.......................... 126 5.4 Comparison to the literature................... 126 5.5 Wh-exclamatives and convention................. 128 5.6 Extension of the proposal to other exclamatives......... 131 5.6.1 Declarative exclamatives.................. 131 5.6.2 Non-scalar wh-exclamatives................ 134 5.7 Conclusion............................. 135 6 Conclusion 137 Bibliography................................. 145 Samenvatting................................. 151 Curriculum Vitae............................... 157 List of Tables 3.1 Sum up: discourse properties................... 87 3.2 Sum up: discourse properties of four wh-exclamative contents. 87 4.1 Sum up: discourse properties................... 108 5.1 Sum up: discourse properties of asserted, appositive and wh- exclamative contents........................ 117 Acknowledgements Have you ever trained for a long distance race in any endurance sport? Say, running a marathon or cycling the Alpe d'Huez mountain 6 times in a row? The process of writing a dissertation is strikingly similar to such training. Curious? Let's go! I'll walk you through the training process for a long distance race in cross-country skiing. First of all, the most important element in the race preparation is coaching. Your coaches are the people who design the whole training process: they make a plan of workouts, give you advice about how to approach a workout and recovery, including advice about food, rest, stretching; they make sure that your condition is optimal for the key races. A coach who provided a basic, but important opportunity, namely, letting me register for the race, is Henriette de Swart. Henriette, thank you for giving me a chance to write my dissertation in linguistics! In addition, I am grateful that you gave me the chance to teach, from which I learnt really a lot, and for the comments on the final version of my dissertation. Rick Nouwen was my \daily" coach in the dissertation-writing process. Rick, thank you for all those inspiring discussions with delicious cups of coffee in different parts of the world, for letting me discover the world of semantics and pragmatics, at the same time independently and under your careful guidance. Thank you for letting me grow as an independent researcher. Another person who belongs to my coaching cohort is Barbara Partee. Bar- bara, thank you for your courses at Moscow State University, which introduced me to the whole new world of semantics and pragmatics and turned my research career in this direction. The second thing that matters a lot in the training process is your team. These are the people who support you in your daily life, because they share all the training experience with you, they work and sweat as much as you do, and they strive to reach similar goals. For me these people were Lisa Bylinina and Marlies Paenen. Lisa, we got to know each other some years ago in Moscow, and back then I xii was already fascinated by your enthusiasm for linguistics and always wanted to work with you. It's funny that we met each other again in Utrecht, where our fruitful collaboration started. It's even funnier that we went further geograph- ically together, by going to the University of Chicago for a study visit. Thank you for numerous discussions of whatever happened in our (PhD) lives, in any part of the world where we happened to be at a certain moment in time. Marlies, our acquaintance goes back to the time when you were one of my students in the course \Natural Language Processing". I recall that back then you gave me feedback on my way of teaching, including speaking Dutch. Later I welcomed you as an MA student in our project. Thank you for your feedback all these years. I think I learnt from you at least as much as I taught you. The training environment is also incredibly important for successful race preparation. If you're training for a race in the mountains, it makes sense to do workouts in hilly terrain. The Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS provides an inspiring environment for PhD students. First of all, I would like to thank my office mates for our discussions