Part of
Outside the Clause: Form and function of extra-clausal constituentsEdited by Gunther Kaltenböck, Evelien Keizer and Arne Lohmann
[Studies in Language Companion Series 178] 2016
► pp. 305–340
Edited by Gunther Kaltenböck, Evelien Keizer and Arne Lohmann
[Studies in Language Companion Series 178] 2016
► pp. 305–340
The syntax of confirmationals
A neo-performative analysis
This paper explores the form, function and distribution of certain discourse markers which seem to occur outside traditional clause boundaries and are used to request confirmation. These ‘confirmationals’ differ according to what is expected to be confirmed. Some confirmationals trigger a response from the addressee to confirm that the proposition is true; others require a response to confirm that the addressee knows that the proposition is true. This variation is reminiscent of scope effects and suggests that confirmationals should be analysed in syntactic terms despite their peripheral position. For our analysis, we adopt the Universal Spine Hypothesis (Wiltschko 2014), which promotes a hierarchically organized series of core functional projections. We propose that the highest functional projection of a clause is dedicated to a ‘grounding’ layer, which in turn consists of a speaker-oriented and an addressee-oriented structure. The topmost layer is dedicated to regulate response and consists of a position that encodes the call on the addressee. Our analysis of speech act structure is an updated version of Ross’ (1970) performative hypothesis. We explore the predictions and implications of this hypothesis for the syntax-pragmatics interface.
References (59)
Avis, Walter. 1957. Canadian English merits a dictionary. Culture XVIII: 245-256.
Bach, Kent & Harnish, Robert. 1979. Linguistic communication and speech acts. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Beyssade, Claire & Marandin, Jean-Marie. 2006. The speech act assignment problem revisited: Disentangling speaker’s commitment from speaker’s call on addressee. In Selected papers of CSSP 2005, Olivier Bonami & Patricia Cabredo Hofherr (eds), 37-68. <[URL]>
Blakemore, Diane. 2004. Discourse markers. In The Handbook of Pragmatics, Laurence Horn & Gregory Ward (eds), 221-240. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cheshire, Jenny & Williams, Ann. 2002. Information structure in male and female adolescent talk. Journal of English Linguistics 30: 217-238. 
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris.
. 1986 Barriers. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1996. Adverbs and Functional Heads. A Cross-linguistic Perspective. Oxford: OUP.
Clark, Herbert H. & Brennan, Susan E. 1991. Grounding in communication. Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition 13: 127-149.
Clark, Herbert H. & Schaefer, Edward F. 1989. Contributing to discourse. Cognitive Science 13(2): 259-294.
Clark, Herbert H. 1992. Arenas of Language Use. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
Columbus, Georgie. 2010. A comparative analysis of invariant tags in three varieties of English. English World-Wide 31(3): 288-310.
Culicover, Peter W. 1992. English tag questions in universal grammar. Lingua 88(3): 193-226.
Déchaine, Rose Marie & Wiltschko, Martina. 2002. Decomposing pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 33(3): 409-442.
De Wolf, Galean Dodds, Fee, Margery, Gregg, Robert J. & McAlpine, Janice. 2004. The Survey of Vancouver English: A Sociolinguistic Study of Urban Canadian English (No. 5). Strathy Language Unit, Queen's University.
Dombrowski, Ernst & Niebuhr, Oiver. 2005. Acoustic patterns and communicative functions of phrase-final f0 rises in German: Activating and restricting contours. Phonetica 62: 176-195.
Dombrowski, Ernst & Niebuhr, Oliver. 2010. Shaping phrase-final rising intonation in German. Proceedings of the
5th International Conference on Speech Prosody
, Chicago, USA.
Farkas, Donka F. & Bruce, Kim B. 2009. On reacting to assertions and polar questions. Journal of Semantics 27: 81-118.
Fraser, Bruce. 2006. Towards a theory of discourse markers. Approaches to Discourse Particles 1: 189-204.
Ginzburg, Jonathan. 2012. The Interactive Stance. Oxford: OUP.
. 1996. Interrogatives: Questions, facts and dialogue. In The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, Shalom Lappin (ed.), 385–422. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gibson, Deborah Jean. 1976. A Thesis on eh
. PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia.
Gold, Elaine. 2008. Which eh is the Canadian eh? Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 27: 73-85.
Gunlogson, Christine. 2008. A question of commitment. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 22: 101-136.
. 2003. True to Form: Rising and Falling Declaratives as Questions in English. London: Routledge.
Gussenhoven, Carlos. 1984. On the Grammar and Semantics of Sentence Accents. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2007. Pre-established categories don't exist: Consequences for language description and typology. Linguistic Typology 11: 119-132.
Heim, Johannes, Keupdjio, Hermann, Lam, Zoe Wai-Man, Osa-Gomez, Adriana & Wiltschko, Martina. 2014. Proceedings of CLA. <[URL]>
Heim, Johannes. 2015. Expertise and common ground. Ms. UBC.
Holmberg, Anders. 2015. The syntax of yes and no. Oxford University Press.
Hinzen, Wolfram. 2014. Recursion and truth. In Recursion: Complexity in Cognition, Margaret Speas & Thomas Roeper (eds), 113-137. Dordrecht: Springer.
Hirschberg, Julia & Ward, Gregory. 1995. The interpretation of the high-rise question contour in English. Journal of Pragmatics 24: 407-412.
Kayne, Richard S. 1994. The antisymmetry of syntax. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Krifka, Manfred. 2013. Response particles as propositional anaphors. Semantics and Linguistic Theory. Vol. 23. 1–18.
Lam, Zoe Wai-Man. 2014. A complex ForceP for speaker- and addressee-oriented discourse particles in Cantonese. Studies in Chinese Linguistics 35: 61-80.
Malamud, Sophia A. & Stephenson, Tamina C. 2011. Three ways to avoid commitments: Declarative force modifiers in the conversational scoreboard. Journal of Semantics 31: 1-37.
Meyerhoff, Miriam. 1992. ‘We’ve all got to go one day, eh?’: Powerlessness and solidarity in the functions of a New Zealand tag. In Locating Power: Proceedings of the Second Annual Berkeley Women and Language Conference, Kira Hall, Mary Bucholtz & Birch Moonwomon (eds), Berkeley CA: Berkeley Women and Language Group.
Pierrehumbert, Janet, & Hirschberg, Julia. 1990. The meaning of intonational contours in the interpretation of discourse. In Intentions in Communication, Philip R. Cohen, Jerry Morgan & Martha E. Pollack (eds), 271-311. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Pollock, Jean Yves. 1989. Verb movement, universal grammar and the structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry 20: 365-425.
Postal, Paul. 1969. Anaphoric islands. Chicago Linguistic Society 5: 205-239.
Ramchand, Gillian & Svenonius, Peter. 2014. Deriving the functional hierarchy. Language Sciences 46: 152-174.
Rizzi, Luigi. 1991. The fine structure of the left periphery. In Elements of grammar, Liliane Haegeman (ed), 281–337. Dortrecht, Kluwer.
Ross, John R. 1970. On declarative sentences. In Readings in English Transformational Grammar, Roderick A. Jacobs & Peter S. Rosenbaum (eds), 222-272. Waltham MA: Ginn & Co.
Sailor, Craig. 2009. Tagged for Deletion: A Typological Approach to VP Ellipsis in Tag Questions. MA thesis, UCLA.
Searle, John R. 1969. Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Vol. 626. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Speas, Penny & Tenny, Carol. 2003. Configurational properties of point of view roles. Asymmetry in Grammar 1: 315-345.
Stalnaker, Robert 1978. Assertion. In Syntax and Semantics 9: Pragmatics, Peter Cole (ed.), 315-332. New York NY: Academic Press.
Stubbe, Maria & Holmes, Janet. 1995. You know, eh and other exasperating ‘expressions’: An analysis of social and stylistic variation in the use of pragmatic devices in a sample of New Zealand English. Language and Communication 15: 63-88.
Thoma, Sonja. 2016. Discourse particles in Bavarian German. PhD dissertation, UBC.
Trinh, Tue & Crnic, Luka. 2011. On the rise and fall of declaratives. Proceedings of
Sinn and Bedeutung (SuB)
15: 645-660.
Truckenbrodt, Harald. 2013. Satztyp, Prosodie und Intonation. In Satztypen des Deutschen, Jörg Meibauer, Markus Steinbach & Hans Altmann (eds), 570-601. Berlin: De Gruyter.
. 2012. Semantics of intonation. In Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, Vol. 3, Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger & Paul Portner (eds), 2039-2969. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Wiltschko, Martina. in press-a. Ergative constellations in the structure of speech acts.
. in press-b. Response particles beyond answering. In Order and Structure in Syntax, Laura Bailey and Michelle Sheehan (eds). Berlin: Language Science Press.
. 2014. The Universal Structure of Categories: Towards a Formal Typology. Cambridge: CUP.
Wiltschko, Martina & Alex d’Arcy. 2015. Deriving variation in function. A case study of Canadian ‘eh’ and its kin. Paper presented at
NWAV 44
, University of Toronto (October 2015).
Woods, Howard B. 1980. The Ottawa Survey of Canadian English. Kingston: Strathy Language Unit, Queen’s University.
Cited by (33)
Cited by 33 other publications
Biasio, Marco & Dario Del Fante
2024. Once known, always known. Turn-final sai in North-East regional Italian. Folia Linguistica 0:0 
Yang, Barry C.-Y.
Matsumoto, Daiki
2023. Social evolution and commitment: Bridging the gap between formal linguistic theories and language evolution research. Biolinguistics 17
Menza, Salvatore & Valentina Bianchi
2023. Cooperativity Markers in the Left Periphery. Evidence from Sicilian and from Lombard Italian. Probus 35:1 ► pp. 99 ff.
Clausen, Yulia & Tatjana Scheffler
2022. A corpus-based analysis of meaning variations in German tag questions Evidence from spoken and written conversational corpora. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 18:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka
2022. Chapter 12. Mandarin exhaustive focus shì and the syntax of discourse congruence. In Particles in German, English, and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series, 224], ► pp. 323 ff.
Heim, Johannes M. & Martina E. Wiltschko
2022. Timing of belief as a key to cross-linguistic variation in common ground management. Linguistics Vanguard 8:s2 ► pp. 261 ff.
TROTZKE, ANDREAS & LAIA MAYOL
2021. Catalan focus markers as discourse particles. Journal of Linguistics 57:4 ► pp. 871 ff.
van Elswyk, Peter
2021. Reviving the performative hypothesis?. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 10:4 ► pp. 240 ff.
Wiltschko, Martina
2021. Universal underpinnings of language-specific categories. In Linguistic Categories, Language Description and Linguistic Typology [Typological Studies in Language, 132], ► pp. 59 ff.
WOODS, REBECCA
2021. Towards a model of the syntax–discourse interface: a syntactic analysis of please. English Language and Linguistics 25:1 ► pp. 121 ff.
Badan, Linda
2020. Italian Discourse Markers: The Case of Guarda te*. Studia Linguistica 74:2 ► pp. 303 ff.
Badan, Linda
2021. Chapter 5. Verb-based discourse markers in Italian. In Pragmatic Markers and Peripheries [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 325], ► pp. 143 ff.
Denis, Derek
2020. How Canadian was eh? A baseline investigation of usage and ideology. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 65:4 ► pp. 583 ff.
Colasanti, Valentina & Giuseppina Silvestri
2019. Matrix complementizers in Italo-Romance. In Italian Dialectology at the Interfaces [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 251], ► pp. 155 ff.
Espinal, M.Teresa & Susagna Tubau
2019. Response Systems: The Syntax and Semantics of Fragment Answers and Response Particles. Annual Review of Linguistics 5:1 ► pp. 261 ff.
Corr, Alice
2018. Matrix complementisers and ‘speech act’ syntax. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13 [Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory, 13], ► pp. 75 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. Conclusions. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 299 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. The expression of affect. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 157 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. Utterances without commitment. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 203 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. The Grammar of the Utterance,
Corr, Alice
2022. Doing things with utterance grammar. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 135 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. Vocatives. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 51 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. Introduction. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 1 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. A grammar for the utterance. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 15 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. The grammar of dialogue. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 251 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. Interjections and particles. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 99 ff.
Jessica Coon, Diane Massam & Lisa Demena Travis
2017. The Oxford Handbook of Ergativity,
Rodríguez Ramalle, Teresa
1970. La estructura funcional en los límites de la oración. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 75 ► pp. 107 ff.
[no author supplied]
[no author supplied]
2022. Copyright Page. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. iv ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. List of Abbreviations. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. xi ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. General Preface. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. vii ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.