Sách True to Form: Rising and Falling Declaratives as Questions in English

Title: TRUE TO FORM: Rising and Falling Declaratives as Questions in English

Author(s): Christine Gunlogson

Publisher: Routledge

Date: 2003

Pages: 117

Size: 769 kB

Format: PDF

Quality: High

Language: American English

Content:

This book is concerned with the meaning and use of two kinds of declarative sentences: 1) It's raining? 2) It's raining. The difference between (1) and (2) is intonational: (1) has a final rise--indicated by the question mark--while (2) ends with a fall. Christine Gunlogson's central claim is that the meaning and use of both kinds of sentences must be understood in terms of the meaning of their defining formal elements, namely declarative sentence type and rising versus falling intonation.

Gunlogson supports that claim through an investigation of the use of declaratives as questions. On one hand, Gunlogson demonstrates that rising and falling declaratives share an aspect of conventional meaning attributable to their declarative form, distinguishing them both from the corresponding polar interrogative (Is it raining?) and constraining their use as questions. On the other hand, since (1) and (2) constitute a minimal pair, differing only in intonation, systematic differences in character and function between them--in particular, the relative "naturalness" of (1) as a question compared to (2) --must be located in the contrast between the fall and the rise.


To account for these two sets of differences, Gunlogson gives a compositional account of rising and falling declaratives under which declarative form expresses commitment to the propositional content of the declarative. Rising versus falling intonation on declaratives is responsible for attribution of the commitment to the Addressee versus the Speaker, respectively. The result is an inherent contextual "bias" associated with declaratives, which constitutes the crucial point of difference with interrogatives. The compositional analysis is implemented in the framework of context update semantics (Heim 1982 and others), using an articulated version of the Common Ground (Stalnaker 1978) that distinguishes the commitments of the individual discourse participants.


Restrictions on the use of declaratives as questions, as well as differences between rising and falling declaratives as questions, are shown to follow from this account. Gunlogson argues that neither rising nor falling declaratives are inherently questioning--rather, the questioning function of declaratives arises through the interaction of sentence type, intonation, and context.

Edited by

Laurence Horn

Yale University

Contents

List of Figures

viii

Abstract

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

1 Introduction

1

1.1 Overview

1

1.2 Assumptions

5

1.3 Previous accounts

10

2 The Distribution of Declarative Questions

13

2.1 Introduction

13

2.2 Declarative bias

14

2.3 Lack of Speaker commitment

20

2.4 Reconciling bias with lack of commitment

23

3 Modeling Bias and Neutrality

25

3.1 The discourse context

25

3.2 Declarative meaning and locution meaning

32

3.3 Interrogative meaning

36

3.4 Locutionary bias and neutrality

38

3.5 Entailment, uninformativeness, and vacuousness

40

3.6 Operating on commitment sets

45

4 Questioning

48

4.1 Uninformativeness and questioning

48

4.2 The Contextual Bias Condition on declarative questions

51

4.3 pphlar questions defined

64

4.4 The distribution of rising declarative questions revisited 74

4.5 What reiterative questions are good for

78

5 Conclusion

85

5.1 Review of the analysis

85

5.2 Intonational meaning, sentence type, and context

88

5.3 Future developments 93

5.4 In closing

97

References

99

Index

102