The proper treatment of egophoricity in Kathmandu Newari

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Coppock ◽  
Stephen Wechsler
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
First Person ◽  
Proper Treatment ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Formal Treatment ◽  
Discourse Model ◽  
De Se ◽  
The Common ◽  
Speech Reports

In egophoric (or conjunct/disjunct) verb-marking systems, a conjunct verb form co-occurs with first-person subjects in declaratives and second-person subjects in interrogatives, and also appears in de se attitude and speech reports; a disjunct verb form appears elsewhere. Conjunct marking also interacts with evidentiality: a speaker who abdicates responsibility for the content of an utterance by means of an evidential marker uses the disjunct verb form despite co-occurence with a first-person subject. Focussing on the case of Kathmandu Newari, Coppock and Wechsler propose that conjunct morphology marks the contents of attitudes de se. They develop a formal treatment of egophoricity, including a dynamic discourse model of the way attitudes de se are communicated. The propositional content of an attitude de se, modelled as a set of centered worlds, is effectively uncentered by its agent, to produce an ordinary proposition that is eligible to enter the common ground.

The Semantics of Evidentials

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Formal Semantics ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Common ◽  
Issue Content

This book gives a compositional, truth‐conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentials set in a theory of the semantics for sentential mood. Central to this semantics is a proposal about a distinction between what propositional content is at‐issue, roughly primary or proffered, and what content is not‐at‐issue. Evidentials contribute not‐at‐issue content, more specifically what I will call a not‐at‐issue restriction. In addition, evidentials can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. Building on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials and related phenomena, the proposed semantics does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, I argue that all sentences make three contributions: at‐issue content, not‐at‐issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At‐issue content is presented, made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground. Not‐at‐issue content directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary relation uses the at‐issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type (e.g., declarative, interrogative), can trigger further updates. Empirical support for this proposal comes from Cheyenne (Algonquian, primary data from the author’s fieldwork), English, and a wide variety of languages that have been discussed in the literature on evidentials.

Assertoric commitments

2008 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 155-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikhail Kissine
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Direct Perception ◽  
The Common

This paper deals with the two kinds of commitment associated with assertive speech acts: the commitment to having justifications for the propositional content and the commitment to the truth of this content. It is argued that the former kind of commitment boils down to the monotonic commitment to the truth of the propositional content, and can be cancelled. The latter, by contrast, is non-monotonic, and is associated with all assertive speech acts, even those containing a reservation marker. These facts can be explained if one (a) endorses the ‘Direct Perception’ view, according to which every piece of communicated information goes, by default, into the hearer’s ‘belief box’; (b) defines the success of assertive speech acts in terms of the possibility to update the common ground with their propositional content.

Verb Second declaratives, assertion, and disjunction revisited

2020 ◽  
pp. 281-296
Author(s):  
Hans-Martin Gärtner ◽  
Jens Michaelis
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Transfer Mechanism ◽  
Illocutionary Force ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Discourse Model ◽  
The Common ◽  
Level Intersection ◽  
Run Up ◽  
Force Potential

This chapter revisits previous work (Gärtner and Michaelis 2010), which discusses the prospects of theories that derive the distribution of V2-declaratives from their affinity with assertive illocutionary force (potential). It reiterates the challenge disjunctive coordination of V2-declaratives poses to commitment-based contruals of assertion. Likewise, it restates the take on this challenge in earlier work which ‘weakens assertion’ to proposition-level intersection with the common ground. Against the backdrop of this proposal, two recent approaches to the ‘disjunction challenge’ are analysed: (i) a feature-transfer mechanism proposed by Julien (2015), which exempts V2-disjuncts from being directly asserted; (ii) a discourse model developed by Antomo (2016), which discards assertion and, instead, requires the content of V2-declaratives to be relevant to the current question(s) under discussion. The chapter shows that both these approaches run up against serious obstacles, compositionality in the former case, the hard to control flexibility of question-answer relations in context in the latter (among other things). It goes on to conclude that the ‘disjunction challenge’ to accounts of the distribution of V2-declaratives still stands.

Expressing the Self

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
The Self ◽  
Epistemic Status ◽  
First Person ◽  
Semantic Categories ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Person Reference ◽  
De Se ◽  
Novel Method ◽  
Cultural Pragmatics

This book addresses different linguistic and philosophical aspects of referring to the self in a wide range of languages from different language families, including Amharic, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Newari (Sino-Tibetan), Polish, Tariana (Arawak), and Thai. In the domain of speaking about oneself, languages use a myriad of expressions that cut across grammatical and semantic categories, as well as a wide variety of constructions. Languages of Southeast and East Asia famously employ a great number of terms for first-person reference to signal honorification. The number and mixed properties of these terms make them debatable candidates for pronounhood, with many grammar-driven classifications opting to classify them with nouns. Some languages make use of egophors or logophors, and many exhibit an interaction between expressing the self and expressing evidentiality qua the epistemic status of information held from the ego perspective. The volume’s focus on expressing the self, however, is not directly motivated by an interest in the grammar or lexicon, but instead stems from philosophical discussions of the special status of thoughts about oneself, known as de se thoughts. It is this interdisciplinary understanding of expressing the self that underlies this volume, comprising philosophy of mind at one end of the spectrum and cross-cultural pragmatics of self-expression at the other. This unprecedented juxtaposition results in a novel method of approaching de se and de se expressions, in which research methods from linguistics and philosophy inform each other. The importance of this interdisciplinary perspective on expressing the self cannot be overemphasized. Crucially, the volume also demonstrates that linguistic research on first-person reference makes a valuable contribution to research on the self tout court, by exploring the ways in which the self is expressed, and thereby adding to the insights gained through philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.

Inverse agreement in Hungarian

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
András Bárány
Keyword(s):  
First Person ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Morphological Effect ◽  
Object A ◽  
Feature Sets ◽  
Explicit Analysis ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
Object Agreement

This chapter turns to object agreement with personal pronouns in Hungarian. Pronouns are interesting because they do not always trigger agreement with the verb: first person objects never trigger object agreement (morphology), and second person pronouns only do with first person singular subjects. It is proposed that the distribution of object agreement is a morphological effect and argues that all personal pronouns do in fact trigger agreement, but agreement is not always spelled out. This means that Hungarian has an inverse agreement system, where the spell-out of agreement is determined by the relative person feature (or person feature sets) of the subject and the object. A formally explicit analysis of the syntax and the morphological spell-out of agreement is provided.

Can Groups Assert That P?

2019 ◽  
pp. 326-344
Author(s):  
Deborah Tollefsen
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Constitutive Rule ◽  
The Past ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Common ◽  
Declarative Statement ◽  
John Macfarlane

When a group or institution issues a declarative statement, what sort of speech act is this? Is it the assertion of a single individual (perhaps the group’s spokesperson or leader) or the assertion of all or most of the group members? Or is there a sense in which the group itself asserts that p? If assertion is a speech act, then who is the actor in the case of group assertion? These are the questions this chapter aims to address. Whether groups themselves can make assertions or whether a group of individuals can jointly assert that p depends, in part, on what sort of speech act assertion is. The literature on assertion has burgeoned over the past few years, and there is a great deal of debate regarding the nature of assertion. John MacFarlane has helpfully identified four theories of assertion. Following Sandy Goldberg, we can call these the attitudinal account, the constitutive rule account, the common-ground account, and the commitment account. I shall consider what group assertion might look like under each of these accounts and doing so will help us to examine some of the accounts of group assertion (often presented as theories of group testimony) on offer. I shall argue that, of the four accounts, the commitment account can best be extended to make sense of group assertion in all its various forms.

The stand-up comedian as an egocentric communicator

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Ibukun Filani
Keyword(s):  
Concept Formation ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Communicative Behavior ◽  
Stand Up Comedy ◽  
General Perspective

Abstract The general perspective in pragmatics research on stand-up comedy is that the comedian co-produces humor with the audience. In this paper, I argue that the stand-up comedian’s communicative behavior is also partly rooted in egocentrism. To achieve this, I adopted a sociocognitive approach to intention and egocentrism in analyzing a routine that was performed in Chicago by Okey Bakassi, a Nigerian stand-up comedian. I operationalize egocentrism as one of the humor strategies of the comedian. While focusing on the propositional content of the comedian’s utterances, the analysis revealed strategies like privatization, ad hoc concept formation and ad hoc coherence, which the comedian used in individualizing the prior common ground to generate the needed incongruity for humor in the performance sphere.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document