Gunlogson (2007) claims that (i) declaratives used as questions express a propositional commitment just as normal assertions do, but that (ii) this commitment is not attributed to the speaker’s but to the addressee’s commitment-set. Thus, Gunlogson (2007) interprets all declarative questions as “attributive” utterance types involving a commitment-shift from speaker to addressee. By contrast, I will argue that not all declarative questions involve the suggested commitment-shift. I will distinguish two types of declarative questions, (i) echo questions (with declarative sentence type) and (ii) confirmative questions. Whereas echo questions leave the speaker’s commitment-set untouched, confirmative questions involve speaker-commitment. Moreover, echo questions and confirmative questions behave very differently with respect to intonation patterns (rising versus falling), the type of sentence they instantiate and certain meta-linguistic operations.
2024. Force shift: a case study of Cantonese ho2 particle clusters. Natural Language Semantics 32:3 ► pp. 315 ff.
Staps, Camil & Johan Rooryck
2023. The interpretation of [+distal] in demonstratives and complementizers. Linguistics 61:5 ► pp. 1195 ff.
Kiss, Angelika
2022. The Hungarian question tag mi? As characterized by dependent and independent commitments. Acta Linguistica Academica 69:2 ► pp. 206 ff.
Bhadra, Diti
2020. The Semantics of Evidentials in Questions. Journal of Semantics 37:3 ► pp. 367 ff.
Brabanter, Philippe De
2019. A demanding commitment to non-psychological explanations
. Theoretical Linguistics 45:1-2 ► pp. 31 ff.
Geurts, Bart
2019. Commitments continued. Theoretical Linguistics 45:1-2 ► pp. 111 ff.
Jeong, Sunwoo
2018. Intonation and Sentence Type Conventions: Two Types of Rising Declaratives. Journal of Semantics 35:2 ► pp. 305 ff.
Jeong, Sunwoo
2021. Deriving politeness from an extended Lewisian model: The case of rising declaratives. Journal of Pragmatics 177 ► pp. 183 ff.
Westera, Matthijs
2018. Rising declaratives of the Quality-suspending kind. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3:1
Malamud, S. A. & T. Stephenson
2015. Three Ways to Avoid Commitments: Declarative Force Modifiers in the Conversational Scoreboard. Journal of Semantics 32:2 ► pp. 275 ff.
Gärtner, Hans-Martin & Beáta Gyuris
2012. Pragmatic markers in Hungarian: Some introductory remarks. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 59:4 ► pp. 387 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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