Publications

Publication details [#8290]

Sag, Ivan A. and Mark Liberman. 1975. The intonational disambiguation of indirect speech acts. Papers from the Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 11 : 487–497.

Publication type

Article in journal

Publication language

English

Keywords

ambiguity | indirect speech act | intonation | literal meaning | question

Annotation

S. suggests that there are ways to disambiguate direct vs. indirect uses of questions, though the disambiguation is not complete: some intonation contours can force a literal interpretation, but no intonation contour can force an indirect interpretation.