scholarly journals Characterising the alternative and polar questions of Irish

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 142-159
Author(s):  
Brian Nolan
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Question Types ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Alternative Questions ◽  
Question Form ◽  
Alternative Choice

This paper gives an account of the similarities and differences between alternative and polar questions, where these question forms stand at the intersection of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. We contrastively examine the nature of alternative and polar yes-no questions. We characterise the forms of these question types and the functions they serve. We examine the semantic and pragmatic dimensions of each question form and their answers. We characterise the felicity conditions necessary for their successful realisation of the speech act of requesting information via the alternative and yes-no interrogatives and assume that information is freely exchanged under a Gricean presumption of cooperation. We show that alternative questions have some similarities, but also significant differences, to polar yes-no questions. Alternative questions do not allow for yes-no answers. Instead, an appropriate answer must contain one of a selection from the alternative choice options listed in the framing of the question. Alternative questions are dependent on the presence of disjunction. We characterise the syntax and semantics of polar yes-no questions. We demonstrate in respect of the answers to polar yes-no questions of Irish that they contain instances of ellipsis and are full clausal expressions with a complete semantics where the elided elements are from the question part of the question-answer pair. The propositional content of polar yes-no questions is inferred from the context, specifically from the question with which the answer is paired. Irish does not have any exact words which directly correspond to English ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and so employs different strategies where a yes-no answer is required.

Speech Acts in Discourse Context

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craige Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Language Game ◽  
Illocutionary Force ◽  
Semantic Type ◽  
Discourse Context ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Consensus View ◽  
Grammatical Mood ◽  
The Relationship

This essay sketches an approach to speech acts in which mood does not semantically determine illocutionary force. The conventional content of mood determines the semantic type of the clause in which it occurs, and, given the nature of discourse, that type most naturally lends itself to a particular type of speech act, i.e. one of the three basic types of language game moves—making an assertion (declarative), posing a question (interrogative), or proposing to one’s addressee(s) the adoption of a goal (imperative). There is relative consensus about the semantics of two of these, the declarative and interrogative; and this consensus view is entirely compatible with the present proposal about the relationship between the semantics and pragmatics of grammatical mood. Hence, the proposal is illustrated with the more controversial imperative.

New Work on Speech Acts

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
New Work ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Recent Advances ◽  
Current Thinking ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Relationship

The essays collected in this book represent recent advances in our understanding of speech acts-actions like asserting, asking, and commanding that speakers perform when producing an utterance. The study of speech acts spans disciplines, and embraces both the theoretical and scientific concerns proper to linguistics and philosophy as well as the normative questions that speech acts raise for our politics, our societies, and our ethical lives generally. It is the goal of this book to reflect the diversity of current thinking on speech acts as well as to bring these conversations together, so that they may better inform one another. Topics explored in this book include the relationship between sentence grammar and speech act potential; the fate of traditional frameworks in speech act theory, such as the content-force distinction and the taxonomy of speech acts; and the ways in which speech act theory can illuminate the dynamics of hostile and harmful speech. The book takes stock of well over a half century of thinking about speech acts, bringing this classicwork in linewith recent developments in semantics and pragmatics, and pointing the way forward to further debate and research.

scholarly journals Presupposition, negation and trivalence

2000 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
PIETER A. M. SEUREN
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Natural Consequence ◽  
Natural Language Semantics ◽  
Close Inspection ◽  
Presupposition Failure ◽  
Language Semantics ◽  
Semantic Properties ◽  
Classical Truth

Close inspection of presupposition(= P-)cancelling and other metalinguistic negation data shows that natural language semantics must be (at least) trivalent, with the values ‘true’, ‘minimally false’ (assertion failure) and ‘radically false’ (presupposition failure). It is argued that presupposition is a semantic phenomenon originating in a distinction between two kinds of satisfaction conditions for predicates, the PRECONDITIONS generating presuppositions, and the UPDATE CONDITIONS generating classical entailments. The trivalence of language is a natural consequence of the acceptance of occasion sentences in an incremental Discourse Semantics. The logical properties of sentences are considered secondary and derived from their semantic properties. These include, besides propositional content, a speech act quality, specifying the personal commitment taken on by the speaker not only in respect of the propositional content, but also with regard to the linguistic forms selected. It is suggested that the classical truth-functional operators should be redefined as instructions under speech act commitment. The negation operator is singled out: it is redefined as an instruction to reject either an incrementable sentence, which may be a comment about a form used or to be used (P-preserving negation), or an already incremented sentence to be removed from the discourse along with some presupposition (P-cancelling negation).

How to refer to one's own words: speech-act modifying adverbials and the performative analysis

1977 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita Mittwoch
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
The Self ◽  
Underlying Structure ◽  
Speech Situation ◽  
Accepted Form

The performative analysis claims that every sentence we utter refers, self-reflexively, to our utterance of it, that every sentence comes equipped in its underlying structure with a higher performative clause of the form I (or Speaker) + Verb of Communication + You (or Hearer) (see especially Ross, 1970; Lakoff, 1971, 1972). The self-reflexive nature of the performative clause is brought out even more clearly by the addition of hereby, which functions as a deictic instrumental adverb referring to the utterance-act. In this paper I shall deal with two sets of data that have been invoked in support of this analysis and I shall try to show that on closer scrutiny they disconfirm it, at least in its generally accepted form. Both concern sentence adverbials that modify not the propositional content of the sentence to which they are attached but what I shall provisionally call the pragmatics of the speech situation; the solutions I shall suggest as an alternative to the performative analysis will, however, differ considerably for the two sets.

The evidential and doxastic dimensions of the Basque particle bide

2015 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Kepa Korta ◽  
Larraitz Zubeldia
Keyword(s):  
Illocutionary Force ◽  
The Other ◽  
Semantic Meaning ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Degree Of Belief ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The One

Two kinds of meanings are usually associated to the Basque particle bide.1 On the one hand, it has been taken to point to the indirect nature of the speaker’s evidence for the truth of the proposition put forward. According to this view, it would be a sort of inferential particle. On the other hand, bide has been associated to the expression of a certain degree of belief or certainty on the truth of the proposition. This double dimension of bide resembles various aspects of the meaning and use of another Basque particle – omen. The morpho-syntactic behaviour of these two particles is practically identical, and their semantics and pragmatics invite a close comparison. Thus, starting from our conclusions regarding omen, we explore the similarities and differences between both particles. We find two main differences. First, bide encodes a doxastic dimension that is absent from the semantic meaning of omen. And, second, bide can be taken to be an illocutionary force indicator that does not contribute to the proposition expressed, while omen does contribute to the truth-conditions of the utterance.

scholarly journals Disambiguating cues of disjunctive questions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Younes ◽  
Sam Hellmuth
Keyword(s):  
Logistic Regression ◽  
Mixed Effects ◽  
Relative Strength ◽  
Main Effect ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Alternative Questions

This paper aims to find out the similarities and differences between Jordanian (JA), Egyptian (EA), and Kuwaiti (KA) Arabic in which cues disambiguate alternative questions (altqs) and disjunctive yes-no questions (dynqs): intonation contour and choice of disjunctive element (DE). A perception study was run in the three dialects, replicating Pruitt & Roelofsen’s (2013) perception study on English. Mixed-effects logistic regression was used to explore the results which revealed all dialects show a main effect of both intonation and DE choice; a rise contour and use of ʔaw significantly increased the likelihood of dynq responses. The effect of intonation was larger than that of DE choice in all dialects. The differences between the dialects lay in the relative strength of the DE coefficients.

scholarly journals The meanings of positive polarity minimizers in Japanese: a unified approach

2015 ◽  
pp. 599
Author(s):  
Osamu Sawada
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Lexical Item ◽  
Positive Polarity ◽  
Unified Approach ◽  
Expressive Meaning ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Pragmatic Motivation ◽  
Internal Variation

In Japanese there are multiple lexical items for positive polarity minimizers (hereinafter, minimizer PPIs), each of which can differ in meaning/use. For example, while sukoshi ‘lit. a bit/a little’ can only express a quantitative (amount) meaning, chotto ‘lit. a bit/a little’ can express either a quantitative meaning or an ‘expressive’ meaning (i.e. attenuation in degree of the force of a speech act). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the semantics and pragmatics of the Japanese minimizer PPIs chotto and sukoshi and to consider (i) the parallelism/non-parallelism between truth conditional scalar meanings and non-truth conditional scalar meanings, and (ii) what mechanism can explain the cross-linguistic and language internal variation between minimizer PPIs. As for the semantics/pragmatics of minimizers, I will argue that although the meanings of the amount and expressive minimizers are logically and dimensionally different (non-parallelism), they can systematically be captured by positing a single lexical item (parallelism). As for the language internal and cross-linguistic variations, it will be shown that there is a point of variation with respect to whether a particular degree morpheme allows a dimensional shift (i.e. an extension from a semantic scale to a pragmatic scale). Based on the above proposals, this paper will also investigate the pragmatic motivation behind the use of minimizers in an evaluative context.

scholarly journals Appendix: question types questionnaire

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 161-170
Author(s):  
Cédric Patin ◽  
Kristina Riedel
Keyword(s):  
Bantu Languages ◽  
Question Types ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Alternative Questions

This questionnaire is intended as an aid to eliciting different question types, including yes/no questions, alternative questions, and wh-questions on a range of constituents. We have taken care to include examples that allow one to test for common Bantu phenomena, such as a subject/non-subject asymmetry in wh-questions and an obligatory immediately after the verb (IAV) position for questioning verb complements. The questionnaire is intended as a guide, only, as every language will have its own set of possibilities and complications. At the end of the questionnaire is a checklist. While we had Bantu languages in mind in devising the questionnaire, we hope it will also be useful to linguists with an interest question constructions in other languages.  

scholarly journals On the Linguistic Analysis of Fake News Texts in German Political Discourse

2020 ◽  
pp. 93-102
Author(s):  
Zhanna Nikonova ◽  
◽  
Ekaterina Soloveva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Linguistic Study ◽  
Text Type ◽  
Functional Features ◽  
Perlocutionary Effect

The article analyzes fake news texts from the perspective of linguistic pragmatics and its key concept, speech act theory. The specificity of fake news lies in the fact that, while ontologically functioning as a carrier of factual information, this type of text contains intentionally false information deliberately presented as real facts, often rendered provocative. Linguistic study of the fake news phenomenon is especially relevant since there is a clear demand for effective tools that would help disclose fake news texts, understand their nature, and describe functional features of such texts in political communication. Analyzing the modern German political discourse, the authors identify a trend of using fake news texts to vilify and destroy the authority and reputation of certain political forces and describe a number of key features of fake news texts. The article outlines issues related to the linguistic study and verification of fake news texts with the hope to develop reliable models for describing this text type and to develop practical guidelines that would enable users to detect fake news in discourse. The study justifies the high explanatory potential of the speech act theory which offers objective means to examine the manipulation mechanism in fake news texts in terms of the illocutionary force and the perlocutionary effect of an utterance. The analysis of the illocutionary struc-ture of fake news messages leads to the conclusion that false propositional content in conjunction with the constitutive rules of the illocution “statement” of the text type “news” is conditional on the high perlocutionary effect of fake news in the modern German political discourse. The article evaluates the prospects of studying fake news texts from within the paradigm of the speech act theory and links them to identifying linguistic markers of deliberate distortion of the true propositional content.

scholarly journals The meanings of positive polarity minimizers in Japanese: a unified approach

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 599 ◽  
Author(s):  
Osamu Sawada
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Lexical Item ◽  
Positive Polarity ◽  
Unified Approach ◽  
Expressive Meaning ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Pragmatic Motivation ◽  
Internal Variation

In Japanese there are multiple lexical items for positive polarity minimizers (hereinafter, minimizer PPIs), each of which can differ in meaning/use. For example, while sukoshi ‘lit. a bit/a little’ can only express a quantitative (amount) meaning, chotto ‘lit. a bit/a little’ can express either a quantitative meaning or an ‘expressive’ meaning (i.e. attenuation in degree of the force of a speech act). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the semantics and pragmatics of the Japanese minimizer PPIs chotto and sukoshi and to consider (i) the parallelism/non-parallelism between truth conditional scalar meanings and non-truth conditional scalar meanings, and (ii) what mechanism can explain the cross-linguistic and language internal variation between minimizer PPIs. As for the semantics/pragmatics of minimizers, I will argue that although the meanings of the amount and expressive minimizers are logically and dimensionally different (non-parallelism), they can systematically be captured by positing a single lexical item (parallelism). As for the language internal and cross-linguistic variations, it will be shown that there is a point of variation with respect to whether a particular degree morpheme allows a dimensional shift (i.e. an extension from a semantic scale to a pragmatic scale). Based on the above proposals, this paper will also investigate the pragmatic motivation behind the use of minimizers in an evaluative context.

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