Definedness conditions on admission-of-ignorance moves
Given a set of alternatives, a speaker can explicitly admit ignorance about which of them hold true. The (in)felicity of such admission-of-ignorance moves immediately following disjunctions and conjunctions follows from the semantics of or and and. However, semantics alone turns out to be insufficient in cases when the disjunction/conjunction and the admission-of-ignorance move are separated by additional conversational moves of acceptance, objection, or removal of an existing assertion. I argue that these patterns follow if admission-of-ignorance are associated to a speech act operator admit whose input is restricted to propositions that the current speaker is publicly committed to at the current conversational stage.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Background and proposal
- 1.2Semantics vs. conversation dynamics
- 1.3Some cases we want to exclude
- 2.A toy model of conversation
- 3.Baseline
- 4.The distribution of alternatives in conversations
- 4.1Alternatives must be in the speaker’s DC
- 4.2Alternatives must appear at the appropriate conversational stage
- 5.Conclusions and outlook
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
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References