UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Grounds for Commitment Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1ps845ks Author Northrup, Oliver Burton Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ GROUNDS FOR COMMITMENT A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LINGUISTICS by Oliver Northrup June 2014 The Dissertation of Oliver Northrup is approved: Professor Donka Farkas, Chair Professor Pranav Anand Professor Adrian Brasoveanu Dean Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Oliver Northrup 2014 Table of Contents List of Figures vi List of Tables vii Abstract viii Acknowledgments x 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Overview ......................................... 1 1.2 Discourse is a commitment space . 5 1.2.1 The common ground . 5 1.2.2 Affecting the common ground . 7 1.2.3 Discourse commitments . 9 1.2.4 An initial model of discourse . 11 2 An evidential model of discourse 17 2.1 Introduction ........................................ 17 2.2 Variation in commitment . 19 2.2.1 Sourcehood . 19 2.2.2 Conditional commitment . 22 2.2.3 A fledgling model of discourse . 28 2.3 Evidentiality as grounds for commitment . 29 2.3.1 Evidentiality primer . 29 2.3.2 The not-at-issue effects of evidentiality . 32 2.4 A revised model for commitments . 38 2.4.1 Model architecture . 38 2.4.2 Examples . 47 2.4.3 Summary . 54 2.5 Further evidence and issues . 54 2.5.1 Attested and unattested bases . 55 2.5.2 Commitment modification versus ‘hedging’ . 57 2.5.3 Commitment, evidentiality, and epistemic modality . 58 iii 2.5.4 Evidence source, or reliability? . 60 2.6 Conclusions and next steps . 63 3 Japanese discourse particles as relative discourse evidentials 64 3.1 Introduction ........................................ 64 3.2 Japanese discourse particles . 66 3.2.1 A simplified picture of yo ............................ 67 3.2.2 yo and intonation . 71 3.2.3 The distribution of ne .............................. 78 3.2.4 The distribution of yone ............................. 81 3.2.5 Particles versus bare utterances . 85 3.3 Existing approaches . 86 3.3.1 McCready (2008) . 86 3.3.2 Davis (2011) . 88 3.3.3 Desiderata..................................... 93 3.4 An evidential model of discourse . 94 3.4.1 Summary of previous commitments . 94 3.4.2 Commitments to action . 99 3.4.3 The role of sourcehood . 102 3.5 Measuresofauthority ................................ 105 3.5.1 Sourcehood (in)compatibility with yo and ne . 105 3.5.2 Epistemic and deontic authority . 108 3.5.3 Relative authority . 109 3.6 yo and ne as relative authority markers . 111 3.6.1 Reframing the generalizations . 111 3.6.2 yo as a marker of maximal speaker authority . 112 3.6.3 ne as a marker of minimal speaker authority . 116 3.6.4 Capturing yone .................................. 117 3.6.5 Summary of the account . 118 3.7 Details and further predictions . 119 3.7.1 Pragmatic competition . 119 3.7.2 Exclamativity . 121 3.7.3 Interactions with intonation . 128 3.8 Extension: Singlish lah ..................................129 3.8.1 Language profile . 130 3.8.2 Data: lah ...................................... 131 3.8.3 Previous approaches to particles . 135 3.8.4 Discourse-evidential solution . 138 3.8.5 Conclusions about lah ..............................144 3.9 Conclusions and next steps . 145 iv 4 An evidential approach to biased questions 147 4.1 Introduction ........................................ 147 4.2 Kinds of bias . 149 4.2.1 Speaker bias . 150 4.2.2 Contextual bias . 151 4.3 Bias in high negation polar questions . 153 4.3.1 HNPQ and the two biases . 154 4.3.2 A wrench: SB and CE are not bases . 160 4.3.3 The prior base . 164 4.3.4 Novel data and solutions . 168 4.3.5 Interim conclusions . 171 4.4 Aside:ArelatedambiguityinHNPQs . 173 4.4.1 Previous approaches to high negation . 174 4.4.2 A missing reading . 184 4.5 Biasintagquestions .................................. 186 4.5.1 A brief typology of tag questions . 187 4.5.2 Tag questions are biased questions . 198 4.5.3 The discourse effect of tag questions . 202 4.6 Rhetoricaluses..................................... 208 4.6.1 Rhetorical HNPQs . 209 4.6.2 Rhetorical TQs . 211 4.6.3 Answering rhetorical questions . 212 4.7 Constraining expressions of bias . 213 4.7.1 Dimensions of variation in commitments . 213 4.7.2 Variation in polar questions . 215 4.7.3 Conclusions on variation . 222 4.8 Conclusions......................................... 223 5 Conclusion 224 5.1 Review of the analysis . 224 5.1.1 Sourcehood . 226 5.1.2 Relative authority . 227 5.1.3 Bias . 228 5.1.4 Common thread: discourse motives . 230 5.1.5 Issues for the approach . 231 5.2 Futuredirections ................................... 237 v List of Figures 2.1 The structure of discourse commitment lists . 24 4.1 Possible commitment configurations for polar questions . 216 vi List of Tables 3.1 Summary of analyses of lah ............................... 131 vii Abstract Grounds for commitment by Oliver Northrup This dissertation proposes a novel approach to tracking not-at-issue contributions to discourse by bringing together several strands of research concerning evidentiality, illocu- tionary discourse particles, and speaker bias marking, all of which concern phenomena that indicate the relationships between speakers and the information they express in con- versation. I argue that the overall discourse effects in each case should be captured in terms of commitments that are conditioned on various evidential bases. These bases de- rive from the speaker’s private beliefs, his interlocutors’ discourse commitments, and other contextually-rooted sources. They share the common purpose of publicizing the reliability of the commitments that invoke them. The body of this dissertation provides arguments for this approach from several em- pirical domains. Chief among these are the sentence-final discourse particles of Japanese, and biased polar questions in English. For Japanese, I argue that the particles yo, ne, and their combination yone publicize the speaker’s beliefs about his relative authority to sponsor the content of the particle-marked utterance, compared to that of his interlocutors. These simple conditions, encoded in the evidential base, interact with the default effects of an utterance to derive the total discourse effects of the particle-marked utterances, including the ways that these particles seem to limit possible felicitous responses, and why they are disallowed with certain sentence forms but not others. For English biased questions, I ar- gue that high negation polar questions (HNPQs) and two kinds of tag questions (TQs) weakly commit the speaker to one or both answers, depending on the question’s form. These weak commitments can be based on either a prior or current version of their default evidential base, which contains the totality of their private beliefs and any public contextual evidence. The notion of weak commitment is defined in terms of the evidential base’s resistance to change in light of future discourse moves. The results of this investigation are threefold. First, I argue thanks to novel data that each of the above phenomena—as well as others including English polarity particles and viii the Singapore Colloquial English (Singlish) particle lah—receive superior empirical cover- age under the individual analyses advanced here, compared to previous literature. Second, because the general architecture of each solution is shared, the discourse model advanced here allows for a more parsimonious explanation of the formal pragmatic effects of these phenomena. Third, by highlighting the commonalities among these domains and their re- lationship to evidentiality, the model allows for greater insight into the way that linguistic discourse is organized, the differences between default and non-default utterances, and more broadly, the distinction between formal pragmatics and general reasoning about lan- guage use. ix Acknowledgments I’d like to begin by thanking my advisor, Donka Farkas, who has guided this project since it its earliest incarnation as a squib for Semantics B during the winter of 2010. I will miss our weekly meetings, where she provided me with more discussion, advice, and encouragement than I ever could have hoped for; she has been the anchor of my career as a researcher. Thank you also to the other members of my committee, Pranav Anand and Adrian Brasoveanu, who have been both colleagues and role models. Pranav’s breadth of knowledge, and the clarity with which he can see the questions at the core of a project, have been professionally crucial and personally inspiring. Similarly, I am constantly impressed by Adrian’s ability to balance formal rigor with infectious enthusiasm. Of course, there are many others who have helped this project along too. Thank you especially to Scott AnderBois, Manfred Krifka, Lauren Winans, Matthijs Westera, Seth Yalcin, and audiences at the UGGS workshop and Stanford’s SemPrag group for their thoughts and suggestions. Thanks also to Adam Chong, Maho Morimoto, and Jun Yashima for their help with Singlish and Japanese data. Finally, I want to acknowledge all the people who have shared this time with me. In particular, the Linguistics Department at UCSC is a close community, and I am grateful to the faculty, staff, and my fellow grad students for making my time here so rewarding. Thank you also to my parents, my grandparents, and especially to Lauren for supporting and encouraging me. x Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Overview Conversation is a game played at several levels. At its most basic, speakers seek to inform one another about the facts of the world (including about each other). At its most abstract, speakers plan their actions and reason about their interlocutors’ behavior to extract even more meaning.