The proper treatment of egophoricity in Kathmandu Newari

We develop a theory of so-called 'conjunct-disjunct marking', also known as 'egophoricity', in Kathmandu Newari. The signature pattern of egophoricity looks a bit like person agreement: In declaratives, there is a special marker that goes on first person verbs, but not second or third person (e.g. 'I drank-EGO too much'). But in interrogatives, the same marker goes on second person (e.g. 'Did you-EGO drink too much?'). This is called interrogative flip. Egophoric marking also interacts interestingly with the presence of evidential markers, and comes with an implication of knowing self-reference (emphasized in Newari by a restriction to volitional action). Our paper discusses two previous approaches, which we label indexical and evidential, and motivate our account, which we label egophoric. Along the way, we develop a theory of how de se attitudes are communicated.http://eecoppock.info/egophoricity-oup.pdfAccepted manuscrip

Expectation Biases and Context Management with Negative Polar Questions

This paper examines distinctive discourse properties of preposed negative 'yes/no' questions (NPQs), such as 'Isn’t Jane coming too?'. Unlike with other 'yes/no' questions, using an NPQ '∼p?' invariably conveys a bias toward a particular answer, where the polarity of the bias is opposite of the polarity of the question: using the negative question '∼p?' invariably expresses that the speaker previously expected the positive answer p to be correct. A prominent approach—what I call the context-management approach, developed most extensively by Romero and Han (2004)—attempts to capture speaker expectation biases by treating NPQs fundamentally as epistemic questions about the proper discourse status of a proposition. I raise challenges for existing context-managing accounts to provide more adequate formalizations of the posited context-managing content, its implementation in the compositional semantics and discourse dynamics, and its role in generating the observed biases. New data regarding discourse differences between NPQs and associated epistemic modal questions are introduced. I argue that we can capture the roles of NPQs in expressing speakers’ states of mind and managing the discourse common ground without positing special context-managing operators or treating NPQs as questions directly about the context. I suggest that we treat the operator introduced with preposed negation as having an ordinary semantics of epistemic necessity, though lexically associated with a general kind of endorsing use observed with modal expressions. The expressive and context-managing roles of NPQs are explained in terms of a general kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. The distinctive expectation biases and discourse properties observed with NPQs are derived from the proposed semantics and a general principle of Discourse Relevance

Speech Acts: The Contemporary Theoretical Landscape

What makes it the case that an utterance constitutes an illocutionary act of a given kind? This is the central question of speech-act theory. Answers to it—i.e., theories of speech acts—have proliferated. Our main goal in this chapter is to clarify the logical space into which these different theories fit. We begin, in Section 1, by dividing theories of speech acts into five families, each distinguished from the others by its account of the key ingredients in illocutionary acts. Are speech acts fundamentally a matter of convention or intention? Or should we instead think of them in terms of the psychological states they express, in terms of the effects that it is their function to produce, or in terms of the norms that govern them? In Section 2, we take up the highly influential idea that speech acts can be understood in terms of their effects on a conversation’s context or “score”. Part of why this idea has been so useful is that it allows speech-act theorists from the five families to engage at a level of abstraction that elides their foundational disagreements. In Section 3, we investigate some of the motivations for the traditional distinction between propositional content and illocutionary force, and some of the ways in which this distinction has been undermined by recent work. In Section 4, we survey some of the ways in which speech-act theory has been applied to issues outside semantics and pragmatics, narrowly construed

Clause types and speech acts in speech to children

The question of how and when children learn to associate clause type with its canonical function, or speech act, is currently unknown. It is widely observed that declaratives tend to result in assertions, interrogatives in questions, and imperatives in requests. Although such canonical links between clause type and speech acts are principled, they are known to be defeasible. In this corpus study, we investigate how parents talk to their children in the first years of life, and ask how their input might support this mapping, and to what extent it might pose difficulties. We find that the expected link between clause type and speech act is robust in the input, particularly between declaratives and assertions, both of which also occur most frequently. In addition, the non-canonical mappings that do occur are characterized formally, e.g., non-interrogative questions nearly always exhibit rising prosody, and non-imperative requests often contain a modal

From maximality to bias: Biased A-not-A questions in Mandarin Chinese

This study aims to derive the epistemic bias in shi-bu-shi questions, a type of A-not-A question in Mandarin Chinese. I propose: (i) the focus marker shi presupposes that its prejacent is a possible complete answer to the current Question Under Discussion (QUD); (ii) accordingly, shi-bu-shi questions are presupposed to be part of the Focus-strategy of inquiry; (iii) the Focus-strategy of inquiry indicates the questioner's intention to close the current QUD as soon as possible, and to achieve this goal, the questioner should check the answer that she considers most likely to be true. By assuming such completeness-to-likelihood reasoning, a novel link between focus in polar questions and question bias is established. The ramifications of this proposal for related phenomena (e.g., bias in embedded questions, evidential bias) are then discussed

A unified account of inquisitive and assertive rising declaratives

Previous work on rising declaratives has argued that some have an inquisitive interpretation similar to polar questions, and that this meaning is intonationally distinguished by a steep final rise to a high boundary tone, while others have an assertive interpretation, similar to assertions of falling declaratives, that has a shallower final rise to a lower, high boundary tone. I demonstrate that this strict form-meaning correlation does not hold because there are inquisitive rising declaratives that have a shallow final rise. I argue for a unified theory of rising declaratives with enough interpretational flexibility to explain these crosscutting patterns

Uninquisitive questions

The sort of denotation a sentence is assigned is typically motivated by assumptions about the discourse function of sentences of that kind. For example, the notion that utterances which are functionally inquisitive (asking a question) suggest denotations which are semantically inquisitive (expressing the multiple licit responses to that question) is the cornerstone of interrogative meaning in frameworks like Alternative Semantics (Hamblin, 1973) and Inquisitive Semantics (Ciardelli et al., 2018). This paper argues that at least some kinds of questions systematically do not involve utterances with inquisitive content, based on novel observations of the Estonian discourse particle ega. Though ega is often labeled a ‘question particle’, it is used in both assertions and questions with sharply divergent discourse effects. I suggest that the relevant difference between assertive and questioning uses of ega is not semantic or sentence type-related, but rather reflects an interaction between a unified semantics for declaratives ega-sentences and different contexts of use. I then show that if we assume that ega presupposes that some aspect of the discourse context implicates the negation of ega’s prejacent, and that it occurs only in declarative sentences, we can derive its interpretation across a range of contexts: with the right combination of ingredients, we can ask questions with semantically uninquisitive sentences

Evidencialidad, fuerza asercional y manejo del common ground en el quechua de Conchucos

The literature on Quechuan languages describes the enclitics =mi and =chi as markers of evidentiality, with the former indicating direct evidence and the latter marking conjecture or inference. In this paper, I argue that in Conchucos Quechua they can be better characterised as markers of two degrees of assertional force, which the speakers use for common ground management purposes. For this, I present an analysis of semi-controlled conversational data under the question-under-discussion model of discourse structure. Additionally, I offer a preliminary version of how these functions could be formalised in such a theoretical framework using the model of the Table.La literatura sobre las lenguas quechuas describe los enclíticos =mi y =chi como marcadores evidenciales: el primero indicando evidencia directa y el segundo marcando conjetura o inferencia. Sostengo que en el quechua de Conchucos estos enclíticos se pueden caracterizar mejor como marcadores de dos grados de fuerza asercional, los que son usados por los hablantes para el manejo del common ground. Para ello, presento un análisis de datos dialógicos semi-controlados bajo el modelo de estructura del discurso question-under-discussion. Adicionalmente, ofrezco una formalización preliminar de sus funciones en este marco teórico utilizando el modelo del tablero