Illocutionary mood and speaker attitude

Illocutionary mood and speaker attitude∗
Jessica Rett
October 1, 2013
Abstract
A speaker can express her attitude about the semantic content she
communicates using words (e.g. alas) or intonation (as in exclamations like John won the race! ). I’ll argue that this expressive content
is part of the illocutionary force of the sentence (Rett, 2011; Rett and
Murray, 2013), rather than not-at-issue content, which is arguably
the right way to characterize e.g. epithets (Potts, 2007; McCready,
2012). Because utterances containing attitude markers like alas perform the same speech acts as they would have without the marker,
I’ll argue that these markers should be characterized as illocutionary mood modifiers or something similar. Finally, I will explore the
consequences of this expressive illocutionary mood for theories of
discourse in which mood is characterized in terms of the common
ground (Farkas and Bruce, 2010; Murray, 2013, among others). In
particular, I’ll address the question: if assertions and questions update the common ground, what does expressive illocutionary mood
do (Kaplan, 1999)?
1
Introduction
In this paper I defend and formally implement two claims. The first claim is
that certain morphemes across languages – alas is a good English example –
encode the speaker’s attitude towards the propositional content of the utterance,
and it does so in content that is not at-issue. You might think that this means
that the speaker’s attitude is encoded in not-at-issue content. But there is,
potentially, a distinction between content that is traditionally thought of as
not-at-issue (e.g. implicature or presupposition) and illocutionary or speech act
content (e.g. declarative force). I provide a few arguments for this distinction,
∗ My discussion of mirative evidentials is based on joint work with Sarah Murray. In
addition to Sarah, I’d like to thank Daniel Büring, Sam Cumming, Gabe Greenberg, Mats
Rooth, and Will Starr for their discussion. I’d also like to thank audiences at The Second
Cornell Workshop in Linguistics and Philosophy, CUSP 5 at UC San Diego, and SALT 23 at
UC Santa Cruz.
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Jessica Rett
and then claim that attitude markers like alas contribute illocutionary (not
not-at-issue) content.
The second claim is that the most natural way of characterizing the contribution of these morphemes is in terms of illocutionary mood modification, i.e.
the modification from an act of assertion to an act of assertion with particular
expressive content, as opposed to encoding it in an additional speech act (see
also Vanderveken, 1990).
I argue for the need to implement this relatively intuitive approach to speaker
attitude markers into a compositional semantics. To do so, I draw on recent
theories that model a three-tiered semantic system, including at-issue, not-atissue, and illocutionary content, the latter of which is treated as Stalnakarian
update (Farkas and Bruce, 2010; Murray, 2010, 2013).
I will begin the paper with an apology: as a linguist I am less familiar than
I should be with the field of (ethical/cognitivist) expressivism, which I take
to involve the claim that it is better to treat assertions of sentences S not in
terms of the truth conditions of the putative proposition S denotes but instead
in terms of the speaker’s expressed attitude towards S. My understanding is
that expressivism is rooted in the treatment of normative words like moral and
immoral, but that others – especially here at UofM – are finding it useful to
extend expressivism to other (perhaps all) sentences.
My ignorance prevents me from saying anything terribly useful about how
my claims here relate to this theory. But I’d like to stress that my main goal
is to argue that the utterance of a sentence like Alas, S semantically encodes
illocutionary content that the utterance of S may or may not carry, and that we
need a semantic theory that can account for this content (and its contribution
to discourse). I will propose a treatment within a framework in which sentences
denote propositions but in which utterances carry additional illocutionary information. But I am happy to admit that my proposal could be more naturallly
couched in an expressivist framework.
In the following section, I’ll delineate the empirical focus of this paper, a
class of morphemes or words I’ll call “attitude markers”. Attitude markers
encode information about the speaker’s attitude toward the at-issue content of
the utterance. In §3, I’ll argue that (in contrast to e.g. expressives, Potts 2007)
these markers make their contribution at the illocutionary level (rather than in
other not-at-issue content). In §4, I’ll present a proposal for how this type of
meaning could be captured in a formal, Stalnakarian semantic system, drawing
heavily on the formalism presented in Farkas and Bruce (2010).
2
Attitude markers
Languages employ a variety of markers (read: simple or complex morphemes)
to encode the speaker’s attitude towards a sentence’s propositional content. In
this section, I’ll present a few examples of these attitude markers. In the
next section, I’ll argue that the type of content they encode is expressive rather
than descriptive (Kaplan, 1999), and therefore part of the illocutionary content
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of an utterance rather than its not-at-issue content (Murray, 2010, 2013). For
now, I will attempt to keep my presentation of the meaning of these markers as
theoretically neutral as possible.
One easy example of an attitude marker is the English sentential operator
alas. Vanderveken 1990, 16 describes it as follows:
“[T]he meaning of the adverb alas in a declarative sentence serves
to indicate that the speaker is sad and not happy with the existence
of the state of affairs represented by the propositional content.”1
Vanderveken later mentions the sentential operator fortunately as the antonym
of alas; it indicates, in contrast, that the speaker is pleased with the propositional content.
The attitude marker alas is all I need for the purposes of the theory I’d like
to propose in §4. But, as I’ll argue in §3, it is relatively tricky to work out
exactly what sort of meaning is contributed by attitude markers, and therefore
what we need to add to a theory of discourse to account for them. So I’ll spend
the rest of this section illustrating a few other types of attitude markers from a
few other languages, which will give us a broader and more diverse set of data
to draw from. In particular, I’ll discuss the phenomenon of mirativity.
Another speaker attitude commonly encoded in natural language is something like the attitude of surprise. For the sake of convenience, I will use ‘is
surprised that p’ to mean something like ‘had not expected that p,’ ignoring
potential subtle differences between the two (for some discussion on these differences, see Rett, 2011). In some descriptive traditions, morphemes that mark
this attitude of surprise are dubbed ‘miratives’ (DeLancey, 1997, 2001).
In English, speaker surprise can be marked by intonation. The result is the
difference between the assertion in (1a) and the exclamation in (1b) (Sadock
and Zwicky, 1985; Michaelis, 2001; Merin and Nikolaeva, 2008). I take the exclamation point to model a particular intonation in English: a steady Rise,
abrupt Fall contour (Cruttenden, 1986) plus features of emphasis like lengthening (Bartels, 1999). This intonation is brought out especially well by discourse
particles like wow.
(1)
a.
b.
John arrived on time.
(Wow,) John arrived on time!
I take the difference in meaning between (1a) and (1b) to be all and only
one of speaker attitude: both utterances convey the same propositional content,
but an utterance of (1b) additionally signifies that the speaker is surprised by
(or had not expected) the propositional content.2
1 He goes on to say, “This is why literal utterances of such declarative sentences have the
assertive illocutionary force of a complaint (or lamentation), which has a special sincerity
condition.” I’ll adopt this sort of claim in §3.
2 Exclamations, like other performatives, can be used insincerely (Searle, 1969), so I consider
this characterization of exclamations to extend to sarcastic or other insincere instances. More
on this in §3; see also Rett (2011).
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While English encodes speaker surprise in intonation, other languages encode
the meaning lexically. (I consider the exclamation intonation in (1b) to count
as an attitude marker but recognize that others might be more comfortable
dealing only in lexical markers.) In Finnish, for example, the sentence particle
-pä expresses speaker surprise or astonishment. Like the pair in (1), the pair
in (2) differ only in that (2b) additionally encodes that the speaker finds the
propositional content (that there are lots of flowers) surprising.3
(2)
a.
b.
Täällä on
paljon kukk-ia.
here be-3rd.sg a.lot flower-prt.indf.pl
‘There are lots of flowers here.’
Täällä pä on
paljon kukk-ia.
here pa be-3rd.sg a.lot flower-prt.indf.pl
‘(Wow,) There are lots of flowers here!’
Mandarin also employs sentential operators or adverbs to mark speaker surprise; its mirative marker jingran also has an antonym, indicating that the
speaker is not surprised by or had not expected that p (Wu, 2008).
(3)
Zhangsan guoran/jingran
lai le.
Z
guoran/jingran come part
‘Zhangsan came (as expected/not expected by the speaker).’
The attitude markers I’ve presented have so far carried all and only information about the speaker’s attitude. I will end this section by mentioning what I’ve
called ‘mixed-expression miratives,’ mirative markers that seem to additionally
encode other content (Malchukov, 2004; Gutzmann, 2011; Rett, 2012).
German seems to have several mirative intensifiers (Gutzmann and Turgay,
2011). They differ from typical, non-mirative intensifiers (e.g. sehr, ‘very’) in
that they express speaker surprise.4
(4)
Die Party war
sau cool.
the party be-3sg.pst sau cool.
‘The party was very cool (I can’t believe how cool!).’
Finally, as detailed in Rett and Murray (2013) and elsewhere, there is a robust crosslinguistic tendency for indirect evidential markers to double as mirative markers. I’ll briefly introduce the phenomenon of evidentials and then illustrate mirative evidentials. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll introduce the phenomenon
of mirative evidentials using data from Tsafiki, a Barbacoan language spoken
in Ecuador, as reported in Dickinson (2000).
Tsafiki is an evidential language, which means that all grammatical sentences
3 Thanks to Peter Sutton (p.c.) for drawing my attention to -pä, and to Tuomo Tiisala
(p.c.) for his judgments. -pä can also attach to nouns and verbs; the result seems to be much
like the combination of focus and exclamation intonation in English (namely, the difference
between Wow, JOHNF arrived on time! and Wow, John arrived on TIMEF ! ).
4 The translation in (4) is my own, based on the author’s description of the utterance
meaning. Sau literally means ‘female pig’ in German.
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contain an evidential marker that specifies the source of evidence for its propositional content (Aikhenvald, 2004). Tsafiki’s is a three-way evidential system;
it distinguishes between direct physical evidence (5a), information inferred from
direct physical evidence (5b), and information inferred from general knowledge
(5c) (from Dickinson, 2000, 407–8).5
(5)
a.
b.
c.
Manuel ano fi-e.
M
food eat-decl
‘Manuel ate.’ (The speaker saw him.)
Manuel anno fi-nu-e.
M
food eat-ind-decl
‘Manuel ate.’ (The speaker sees the dirty dishes.)
Manuel anno fi-n-ki-e.
M
food eat-nom-inf-decl
‘Manuel must have eaten.’ (He always eats at 8:00; it’s now 9:00.)
In certain contexts, the indirect evidential nu marks mirativity instead of
indirect evidence. Dickinson (p.411) describes (6) as ambiguous.
(6)
Moto
jo-nu-e.
motorcycle be-ind-decl
‘It is a motorcycle.’ (The speaker hears a motor.)
‘It’s a motorcycle!’
The mirative, exclamation-like interpretation is available despite the speaker
having direct evidence of the motorcycle, i.e. having seen the motorcycle. Following discussion in DeLancey (1997, 2001); Dickinson (2000) and Hintz (2012),
Rett and Murray (2013) characterize contexts that condition the mirative interpretation as ones in which the speaker’s knowledge of the propositional content
is relatively recent. A sentence like (6) with a mirative evidential receive an evidential interpretation in other contexts, provided that the speaker has indirect
evidence for the propositional content.
The polysemy illustrated in (6) – the repurposing of indirect evidentials as
mirative markers – happens across languages and language families: in Turkish
(Slobin and Aksu, 1982), Tibetan (DeLancey, 1997), and Cheyenne (Rett and
Murray, 2013).6
5 The direct evidential is null in Tsafiki. There is lots of evidence in favor of the claim that
it is a null evidential marker (as opposed to the absence of an evidential marker). decl labels
the declarative marker, which encodes assertive illocutionary mood. I’ve labelled the second
evidential ind for ‘indirect’ and the third inf for ‘inferential’.
6 For what it’s worth, there may or may not be a parallel with the English sentential adverb
apparently. (This point comes from joint work with Sarah Murray.) In typical contexts,
apparently signals that the speaker has indirect evidence for the propositional content (Speas
and Tenny, 2003). An utterance of (7), for instance, asserts that John has a car, but also
carries information that the speaker has only indirect evidence of this fact. An utterance of
(7) is natural, for instance, in a context in which the speaker heard that John has a car, or
has seen John walking around with an owner’s manual.
(7)
Apparently, John has a car.
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To sum up this section: across languages, there are ways a speaker can
indicate her attitude about the propositional content of an utterance. This
can be done with intonation (e.g. in English exclamations) or with a sentential
operator or adverb (e.g. English alas or Finnish -pä). The same content can
also be encoded in expressions that seem to have other (descriptive) content,
either simultaneously (e.g. German mirative intensifiers) or in different contexts
(e.g. mirative evidentials).
I have described the contribution of attitude markers with respect to the
propositional content of a sentence or utterance, but I have tried to remain as
neutral as possible about the nature of the contribution. In the next section,
I’ll argue that the semantic contribution of attitude markers is expressive (as
opposed to descriptive, Kaplan 1999) and illocutionary.
3
Attitude markers are illocutionary force modifiers
Let’s focus for a moment on declarative sentences S. I will follow Simons et al.
(2010); Murray (2010, 2013) and other recent work in assuming that the meaning
conveyed by an utterance of S can be divided into three types:
(8)
Meaning conveyed by an utterance of S (e.g. Sam is home)
a. at-issue content p (e.g. the proposition that Sam is home)
b. not-at-issue content q (e.g. the presupposition that Sam has a
home)
c. illocutionary content r (e.g. that the speaker believes p)
It is relatively easy to distinguish between at-issue content and other types of
content. At-issue content can be directly assented or dissented with; it addresses
the question under discussion (QUD; Roberts, 1996); and it does not project
outside of (i.e. is embeddable under) semantic operators like negation (see also
Tonhauser, 2012). It is, effectively, what I was referring to in the previous
section as ‘propositional content’.
3.1
Speaker attitude is not at-issue content
I’ll briefly use these tests on a few of the attitude markers introduced above;
these tests will show that the content about speaker attitude does not qualify as
at-issue or descriptive content. I’ll then argue that there are ways to determine
But (7) can also be used to signify that the speaker had not expected the propositional
content to be true. (7) is also appropriate (and true and felicitous) in a context in which the
speaker, in a discussion with Mary, had previously insisted that John does not have a car,
after the speaker and Mary witness John driving up in a car.
It is not yet clear to me the extent to which (7) behaves exactly like (other) mirative
evidentials, and the extent to which the mirative content of (7) counts as illocutionary, but
the data offer tempting parallels for a general perspective of mixed-expression miratives.
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the difference between not-at-issue and illocutionary content, and that speaker
attitude content behaves like the latter.
First, the speaker attitude contribution of attitude markers cannot be directly agreed with or denied in discourse. (9) shows this for alas; (10) shows
this for English exclamation intonation; Rett and Murray (2013) reproduces
these tests for the Cheyenne mirative evidential.
(9)
(10)
A: Alas, John arrived on time.
B: That’s not true, he was 5 minutes late!
B0 :#That’s not true, you’re clearly happy about his punctuality!
A: (Wow,) John arrived on time!
B: That’s not true, he was 5 minutes late!
B0 :#That’s not true, you’re not surprised. You knew he’d be on time.
The next test, demonstrated in the contrast between (11) and (12) and between (13) and (14), demonstrate that alas and English exclamation intonation
also can’t address the QUD. This test is adopted from Tonhauser (2012).
(11)
A: When did John get here?
B: Alas, John arrived on time.
(12)
A: Were you upset that John arrived on time?
B: #Alas, John arrived on time.
(13)
A: When did John get here?
B: John arrived on time!
(14)
A: Were you surprised that John arrived on time?
B: #John arrived on time!
Finally, neither alas nor exclamation intonation can be embedded under
negation. The negation in both (15) and (16) can only target the at-issue
proposition that John arrived on time.
(15)
a.
b.
c.
Alas, John did not arrive on time.
Alas, it is not the case that John arrived on time.
It is not the case that John arrived on time, alas.
(16)
(Wow,) John didn’t arrive on time!
Exclamation intonation is prosodically picky; (Wow,) It’s not the case that
John arrived on time! sounds odd for presumably phonological reasons. Finnish
offers independent evidence that mirative attitude markers can’t be embedded
under negation; my consultant reports that the negation of a sentence containing
-pä can’t result in negation of the speaker’s attitude, “Even when you attach -pä
to the negation ei, which is a very common usage, it expresses surprise about
something that did not happen, not a lack of surprise” (Tuomo Tiisala, p.c.).
I conclude from these three tests that attitude markers don’t encode at-issue
content; this will probably not be news to anyone. But I additionally think
there’s reason to believe that the content of attitude markers is expressive, illo-
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cutionary content, opposed to projective not-at-issue content like presupposition
or conventional implicature. In my analysis of exclamations, I presupposed this
(Rett, 2011); I argue for it explicitly in Rett and Murray (2013) for both English
exclamation and the Cheyenne mirative evidential. I will repeat the exclamation
tests below in addition to testing alas and the Finnish -pä.
3.2
Speaker attitude is not not-at-issue content
Potts (2005, 2007, 2012) identified a class of phrases he dubbed expressives;
they include the English damn and bastard, as exemplified in (17) (see also Potts
and Kawahara, 2004; Gutzmann, 2011; McCready, 2012).
(17)
a.
b.
The damn dog is on the couch.
I saw that bastard Richard last night.
He argued that their content is encoded as a conventional implicature, with
the same semantic status as e.g. appositives like (18).7
(18)
a.
b.
The dog, who I can’t stand, is on the couch.
I saw Richard, who I think is a bastard, last night.
Potts (2007) bases this claim on, among other things, the fact that expressive content is independent from the regular, at-issue descriptive content;
is anchored to the utterance situation (is ‘nondisplaceable’); and is generally
speaker-oriented (‘perspective dependence’). This also seems true of the content encoded in attitude markers. Yet I will argue that the two differ in subtle
ways, and that the difference amounts to the fact that the semantic contribution
of expressives is encoded in not-at-issue content (in particular, in conventional
implicature) while speaker attitude is encoded in illocutionary content, along
with information about what type of speech act is being made.
The properties Potts lists more or less hold of the content encoded in attitude
markers as well. But I can identify two ways in which speaker attitude differs
from not-at-issue content: in questions, and in speaker denials of content. Taken
together, I believe the data indicate that the former is encoded in illocutionary
content. I’ll address each in turn, but only for a strict subset of the attitude
markers discussed in §2.8
7 I will discuss only prenominal expressives, ignoring words like damn when they behave
more like sentential adverbs (as in Damn, John arrived on time! ). There is some sense in which
damn behaves like alas in this position. If this is the case, I would argue that prenominal damn
encodes not-at-issue content, while adverbial damn (could) encode illocutionary content, just
like alas. There is however at least one complication to this claim: damn, but not alas, can
receive an intensifier reading in a presentential position, just like man, in sentences like DAMN
that room is cold! See McCready (2008) for treatment of these.
8 It’s worthwhile noting that the Mandarin mirative markers and the German mirative intensifiers have been analyzed elsewhere (Wu, 2008; Gutzmann, 2011, respectively) as encoding
speaker attitude as conventional implicature. While I have no evidence that they instead encode the speaker’s attitude in illocutionary content, neither do these authors attend to the
potential differences between conventional implicature and illocutionary content.
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Before I introduce these two tests, I’ll say a little more to better illustrate
the claim I’m making. The claim is that the two sentences in (19) are a minimal pair: (19a), which contains an appositive, encodes the speaker’s attitude
towards the proposition ‘that John arrived on time’ in not-at-issue content. In
contrast (19b), which contains an attitude marker, encodes the same meaning
in illocutionary content.
(19)
a.
b.
John arrived on time, which disappointed me, but Bill did not.
John arrived on time, alas, but Bill did not.
The difference is illustrated in the tables below (although I ignore the second
conjunct in an attempt to simplify things).9
Table 1: the semantic content of (19a)
at-issue proposition
p = λw. john arrived on time in w
not-at-issue restriction speaker is disappointed that p
illocutionary content
propose to add p to the CG
Table 2: the semantic content of (19b)
at-issue proposition
p = λw. john arrived on time in w
not-at-issue restriction
illocutionary content
propose to add p to CG
speaker is disappointed that p
Of course, a sentence can contain both an expressive and an attitude marker,
as in (20), in which case I would characterize the content as in Table 3.
(20)
Alas, John, that bastard, was on time.
Table 3: the semantic content of (20)
at-issue proposition
p = λw. john arrived on time in w
not-at-issue restriction speaker thinks john is a bastard
illocutionary content
propose to add p to CG
speaker is disappointed that p
The first of the relevant empirical tests supporting this distinction involves
questions. The evidentials literature has introduced a term called ‘interrogative
flip’ (Speas and Tenny, 2003; Faller, 2006); it labels a phenomenon wherein a
speaker-oriented meaning (e.g. the source of evidence cited by evidentials) becomes hearer-oriented in questions. This is illustrated in (21) for the Cheyenne
narrative evidential (labelled ‘nar’; data from Murray, 2010).
(21)
a.
É-hó0 tȧheva-hoo0 o Aénohe.
3-win-nar.3sg
Hawk
‘Hawk won (given the stories I heard).
9 I use ‘propose to add p to the CG’ to model assertion in a Stalnakarian update semantics;
I will present this in greater detail in §4.
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b.
Jessica Rett
Mó=é-x-hó0 táhevá-hoo0 o
Aénohe?
y/n=3-rem.pst-win-nar.3sg Hawk
‘Given the stories you heard, did Hawk win?’
The narrative evidential reports on the speaker’s source of evidence in assertions
like (21a), but asks for the hearer’s source of evidence in questions.
In Cheyenne, the narrative evidential is the mirative evidential; it can be
used to mark speaker surprise instead of indirect evidence in certain contexts.
But the mirative interpretation of the narrative evidential is unavailable in questions. Specifically, the question in (21b) can never receive a mirative interpretation, regardless of the type of context it is uttered in (Rett and Murray, 2013).
The Finnish mirative marker -pä, too, is unacceptable in questions. Specifically, both the yes/no and the wh-question version of (2b) is ungrammatical.
The same results hold for attitude markers in English. This is certainly true
for exclamation intonation, which is unavailable in questions at least in part
because the marker itself is incompatible with question intonation in English.
But it is also true for the attutude markers alas and fortunately:
(22)
a. ??Alas/*fortunately, has John arrived on time?
b. Has John arrived on time, ??alas/*fortunately?
c. *Alas/*fortunately, when did John arrive?
d. When did John arrive, *alas/*fortunately?
The different symbols in (22) reflect the reports I’ve received that yes/no
questions can be acceptable with alas, but only in contexts in which the question is biased for a particular reason towards a positive answer. So ‘*’ indicates
ungrammaticality, as usual, while ‘??’ indicates that the meaning is only available in a very specialized context. I will address this asymmetry briefly in §4;
the discussion in Farkas and Bruce (2010) and Farkas and Roelofsen (2013) is
also relevant.
That illocutionary content – in contrast to not-at-issue content – does not
‘flip’ its orientation in interrogatives was originally proposed in Faller (2002).
Faller argues that some evidential markers in Cuzco Quechua encode illocutionary content, as opposed to e.g. Cheyenne evidentials, whose content is arguably
not-at-issue (Murray, 2010).
A second test involves a subtle distinction between contradiction and Moore’s
Paradox. Murray (2010) presented consultants with conjoined sentences; the
first conjunct contains an evidential, and the second conjunct denies the content of that evidential, as in (23), which uses the Cheyenne reportative evidential rpt. Her consultants reported that these sentences seemed contradictory
(marked with #⊥ ).
(23) #⊥ É-hó0 tȧheva-sėstse Aénohe naa oha hovánee0 e
3-win-rpt.3sg
Hawk but
nobody
é-sáa-nė-hé-he-∅.
3-neg-that-say-modA -dir
Intended: ‘Hawk won, it’s said, but nobody said that.’
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This seems to parallel the behavior of evidential adverbials in English and
(other) non-at-issue content, like that encoded in appositives (24a) and expressives (24b).
(24)
a.
b.
The dog, who I can’t stand, is on the couch. #⊥ I don’t mind the
dog so much, though.
The damn dog is on the couch. #⊥ I don’t mind the dog so much,
though.
This sense of contradiction is arguably distinct from the infelicity typically
associated with the denial of illocutionary content, referred to as ‘Moore’s Paradox’ (25). In particular, the denial of the illocutionary content in (25) – sincerity
conditions on assertions and questions, taken from Searle (1969) – seems infelicitous, but it doesn’t seem contradictory as it does in (24).
(25)
a.
b.
It’s raining, #but I don’t believe it’s raining.
Does Sue like pizza? ...#I don’t want to know.
The denial of the content of English exclamation intonation also results in a
Moore’s Paradox effect, as (26) shows. This supports the claim that mirativity
is illocutionary content, more on par with the sincerity conditions on speech
acts rather than not-at-issue content.
(26)
a.
b.
John arrived on time! ...#I’m not surprised, I knew he’d be punctual.
How incredibly early John was for his flight! ...#I’m not surprised,
he arrived exactly when I thought he would.
Interestingly, when the Cheyenne narrative evidential receives a mirative
interpretation, denial of the mirative content – in contrast to its evidential
interpretation, which behaves like the reportative evidential in (23) – results
in infelicity rather than contradiction, as (27) shows (for details, see Rett and
Murray, 2013).
(27)
É-hoo0 kȯhó-neho! #Ná-nėšė-héne0 ena tsé-to0 sė-hešė-hoo0 koho.
3-rain-nar.sg.inan 1-continue-know.s.t cnj-going.to-how-rain
Intended: ‘It’s raining! ... # I knew it was going to rain.’
The denial of the content encoded in the attitude markers alas and fortunately also seem to result in something more like Moore’s Paradox than contradiction. This is illustrated in (28) and (29).
(28)
Alas, John arrived on time. #I’m not disappointed, I prefer that he be
punctual.
(29)
Fortunately, John arrived on time. #I’m not relieved, I wish he weren’t
so punctual.
In particular, these sentences sound odd, but not contradictory in the way that
the sentences in (24) do.
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These judgments – the difference between infelicity and contradiction – are
particularly subtle, so I don’t want to place too much weight on them. But here
is the state of affairs, as I see it: there is are clear differences between at-issue
(a.k.a. descriptive or propositional) content on the one hand, and content that
is clearly semantic but yet doesn’t qualify as at-issue (it is non-embeddable, for
instance, and doesn’t address the QUD). Within that second class of content,
there is independent reason to make two distinctions: semantically encoded
content, like expressives and appositives, which is not-at-issue; and semantically encoded content, like declarative markers or question intonation, which is
illocutionary. Recent ‘three-tiered’ semantic theories accordingly allow for such
a distinction (e.g. Farkas and Bruce, 2010; Murray, 2010, 2013).
But our theory also allows for potential differences between not-at-issue content (like conventional implicature) and illocutionary content (like the conditions
imposed by the act of assertion). Following Rett and Murray (2013), I’ve suggested two possible differences: flexibility across speech acts (i.e., markers that
encode not-at-issue content can occur in a variety of speech acts, while those
that encode illocutionary content can’t, or might not be able to); and the difference between contradiction and Moore’s Paradox, admittedly a subtle one (i.e.,
a speaker’s denial of her not-at-issue content sounds like a contradiction, while
a speaker’s denial of her illocutionary content sounds infelicitous in a different
way). The idea that attitude markers encode illocutionary content also seems
consistent with the discussion in Kaplan (1999).
In §3.3 I’ll propose a precise way in which attitude markers contribute to illocutionary content, which I’ll formalize in §4. But I’ll end this section by briefly
mentioning one other way in which attitude markers pattern with expressives:
attitude markers, like expressives, tend to be speaker-oriented, but can in some
contexts reflect the attitude of the hearer or a third party.
Potts (2005) characterized expressives and other not-at-issue content as
speaker-oriented; Karttunen and Zaenen (2005); Wang et al. (2005); Amaral
et al. (2007) and Harris and Potts (2009) observe that expressives and appositives can be bound by e.g. verbs of saying. The example in (30) is from
Karttunen and Zaenen (2005).
(30)
[Context: We know that Bob loves to do yard work and is very proud of
his lawn, but also that he has a son Monty who hates to do yard chores.
So Bob could say (perhaps in response to his partners suggestion that
Monty be asked to mow the lawn while he is away on business):]
Well, in fact Monty said to me this very morning that he hates to mow
the friggin lawn.
The relevant expressive is friggin, and instead of reporting the speaker’s (Bob’s)
attitude toward yardwork, it seems to be reporting his son’s attitude.
The mirative lo and behold – which I characterize as an appositive because
it requires comma intonation – can also take on a non-speaker-oriented interpretation in context, as demonstrated in (31) (from the Macmillian Dictionary
definition of lo and behold ).
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(31)
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He put her out of his mind. Then, lo and behold, months later, she
turned up again.
In (31), lo and behold is naturally interpreted as reporting on the subject’s (the
referent of he) surprise, not the speaker’s.
Following Harris and Potts (2009) and AnderBois et al. (2013), I will consider
these cases of non-speaker orientation to be a pragmatic phenomenon, the result
of a perspective shift also found in cases of modal subordination (Brasoveanu,
2010). If it is in fact a pragmatic phenomenon, we expect it at least in principle
to extend to illocutionary content. And this is, I believe, what we see.
It seems as though exclamations can be used, in certain contexts to express
that the speaker believes the hearer will be surprised by something. Mats Rooth
(p.c.) gives an example in which A, a seasoned traveller, boards a plane with
B, who’s never flown before. It seems as though A can utter, Yikes! The seats
are so cramped! despite A knowing exactly how cramped the seats will be, as if
for B’s benefit.
The same seems to hold for alas; in a situation in which A is rooting for
Team X but B is rooting for Team Y, A can felicitously utter, (32).
(32)
Alas, Team Y just doesn’t have it in them to win this season.
In doing so, she seems to be reflecting B’s disappointment instead of her own.
To sum up this aside: theories concerning not-at-issue content have been
developed to account for the fact that this content can be non-speaker-oriented
depending on the construction or context in which the markers occur. The
general consensus is that e.g. expressive content is speaker-oriented, but can be
oriented to other individuals via a pragmatic perspective shift.
As this mechanism is pragmatic, it is natural to assume that it is blind to the
type of content (i.e., the difference between not-at-issue and illocutionary content). We therefore predict that (some) speaker-oriented illocutionary content,
too, can undergo a perspective shift. I have presented some English evidence –
the behavior of exclamation and alas – to suggest that this is in fact the case.
It’s certainly the case that attitude markers can not be semantically modified so
that they are anchored to individuals other than the speaker; markers like alas
and pä cannot, of course, be restricted (∗Susan alas, John arrived on time).10
There are two reasons I consider this observation relevant for the discussion
at hand. First: because a pragmatic account of perspective shift in conventional implicature also extends to illocutionary content, we can feel comfortable treating the types of meaning as semantically distinct despite the fact
that they behave similarly in this respect. And second, the recent discussion
10 In Vanderveken’s discussion of fortunately excerpted below, he characterizes alas as
speaker-oriented (the speaker is unhappy with p) but fortunately as reflecting a more
community-general judgment (p is good). This suggests that he evaluated fortunately in
contexts that were more supportive of this pragmatic shift. It’s certainly possible for an utterance of Fortunately, S to reflect the speaker’s opinion; if you are a Tigers fan and I’m a
Dodger’s fan, and we’re watching the two teams play each other, it’s certainly felicitous for
me to say to you, Fortunately, the referees are siding with the Dodgers! without committing
myself to the claim that there is a consensus on this fact.
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of these data in the conventional implicature literature demonstrates that we
can (and, arguably, should) account for instances of non-speaker-oriented illocutionary content while nevertheless maintaining that the content is, at its
core, speaker-oriented. In other words, assuming that illocutionary content is
intrinsically speaker-oriented, a pragmatic theory of perspective shift helps explain why non-speaker-oriented examples like (32) don’t need to be treated as
counter-examples.
3.3
Attitude markers modify illocutionary mood
I’ve argued that attitude markers encode illocutionary content rather than notat-issue content like conventional implicature or presupposition. In this section,
I’ll suggest that the best way of characterizing the contribution of attitude markers is in terms of the modification of the illocutionary mood encoded elsewhere
in the sentence (by mood markers or ‘speech act operators’ like intonation or
declarative or question particles). One prominent alternative is the possibility
that attitude markers are their own illocutionary mood markers, and as a result the utterance of a sentence containing an attitude marker makes multiple
(simultaneous) speech acts. The majority of this section will be dedicated to
arguing against this alternative.
The proposal that attitude markers modify the content encoded in illocutionary operators comes from their treatment in Vanderveken (1990), who focuses
largely on alas.11 He says:
“[T]he addition of a component to an illocutionary force can be expressed in English by combining an expression for that component
with the marker for that force. Thus, for example, the adverbs
fortunately and alas express respectively the preparatory condition
that the state of affairs represented by the propositional content is
good, and the sincerity condition that the speaker is unhappy with
existence of that state of affairs, in the sentences Fortunately, he is
dead and Alas, he is dead. In these sentences, these adverbs modify
the indicative mood of the verb, and serve to compose a syntactically complex marker which expresses the illocutionary force obtained from assertion by adding the condition which they express.
Thus, a declarative sentence whose verb is modified by alas, serves
to perform an assertive speech act stronger than an assertion. A
speaker who uses such a sentence does not simply assert that someone is dead, but also complains or laments about it, since he expresses his unhappiness with the represented state of affairs by his
use of alas.” (Vanderveken, 1990, 128–9)
11 It will also be familar from the work in Faller (2002), in which some Cuzco Quechua
evidentials are analyzed as illocutionary force modifiers, based on Vanderveken (1990). In
Rett (2011) I also adopt Vanderveken’s proposal to treat English exclamation intonation,
although I do not spend much time discussing why.
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Vanderveken’s term ‘indicative mood’ can also be thought of as assertive or
declarative force, which he takes to be part of the content of every utterance,
at some level (see also Searle and Vanderveken, 1985). I will use the terms
‘illocutionary mood’ and ‘illocutionary force’ interchangeably. In English, it’s
most natural to think of illocutionary mood as being encoded in intonation;
other languages (like Japanese and Tsafiki) encode it in sentence particles.
Vanderveken, following Searle (1969) and Searle and Vanderveken (1985),
characterizes illocutionary mood as a function from propositional content to
acts of e.g. assertion or questions. They impose on the propositional content
certain (speaker-oriented) restrictions in the form of sincerity conditions (restrictions on the speaker’s beliefs) and preparatory conditions (restrictions on
the circumstances of the context of utterance).
According to Vanderveken (1990), when an attitude marker like alas modifies this illocutionary content, it restricts or strengthens these conditions. In
particular (p.151), “Any illocutionary force which is stronger than another force
can be obtained from that force by adding a new mode of achievement, or new
propositional content, preparatory or sincerity conditions, or by increasing the
degree of strength.” He models this principle (partially) in (33).
(33)
The illocutionary force [Ψ]F obtained by adding to a force F the sincerity condition Ψ is either identical with or stronger than that force.
(Vanderveken, 1990, 150)
In §4 I attempt to adopt Vanderveken’s proposal into a more formal semantic theory in which the discourse contribution of assertions is modelled in
terms of common ground update. In what immediately follows I’ll argue that
Vanderveken’s proposal is superior to a natural alternative in which attitude
markers are themselves illocutionary operators and utterances containing e.g.
alas result in multiple speech acts.
In what follows I will focus exclusively on alas and English exclamation
intonation, as in (34), although I intend the conclusions to extend to all attitude
markers.
(34)
a.
b.
(Wow,) John arrived on time!
Alas, John arrived on time.
Assume, following Searle (1969), that the speech act of assertion carries the
following constitutive rules, for speaker S and hearer H, and that these are
encoded in the illocutionary mood marker for assertion.
(35)
Constituive rules, assertion
a. propositional content: any proposition p
b. preparatory conditions:
i) S has evidence that p; and
ii) S believes that H needs to know p
c. sincerity conditions: S believes that p
d. essential conditions: counts as an undertaking that p represents an
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actual state of affairs
In Rett (2011), I analyze exclamation intonation (‘E-Force’) as modifying
the speech act of assertion. I propose that, for a context C and a speaker sC in
a world wC :
(36)
E-Force(p), uttered by sC , is appropriate in a context C if p is salient
and true in wC . When appropriate, E-Force(p) counts as an expression that sC had not expected that p.
The effect is a speech act whose constitutive rules are a superset of those of
assertion. Following Vanderveken (1990), I will encode the mirative aspect of
exclamation in the sincerity conditions of the speech act, as modelled in (37).
(37)
Constitutive rules, exclamation
a. propositional content: any proposition p
b. preparatory conditions:
i) S has evidence that p; and
ii) S believes that H needs to know p
c. sincerity conditions:
i) S believes that p; and
ii) S is surprised/had not expected that p
d. essential conditions: counts as an undertaking that p represents an
actual state of affairs
The requirement ‘S had not expected that p’ needs to be further temporally
restricted. The utterance of an exclamation seems felicitous only if the speaker
had not expected that p immediately prior to the utterance time. In particular,
it seems odd to utter Wow, I won the lottery! several years after receiving the
prize. I’ll gloss over this restriction here, referring the reader to Rett and Murray
(2013).
Following Searle (1969) (see especially his discussion of promising, p.57), I
will assume that this additional sincerity condition effects changes in the essential conditions (i.e. the discourse properties) of the utterance. In particular, I
will assume that the utterance of an exclamation counts as an undertaking that
p represents an actual state of affairs by virtue of the fact that it is an act of
assertion. But I will also assume that the utterance of an exclamation counts
as an expression that the speaker is surprised that p by virtue of the fact that
the exclamation’s sincerity conditions require this of the speaker. The essential
conditions of an exclamation, then, effectively include “expresses that S is surprised that p,” but since this is the result of the modified sincerity conditions
as opposed to the result of directly modified essential conditions, I have not
represented it explicitly in (37).
The prediction of this modificational approach is that the contexts that
license an exclamation form a strict subset of those contexts that license its
declarative counterpart. This seems to be the case; the utterance of an exclamation counts as an assertion insofar as its propositional content can be denied,
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as in (38) (see also (10)).12
(38)
A: (Wow,) John arrived on time!
B: No he didn’t, he was 5 minutes late.
In other words, an account of an attitude marker as a modifier of an illocutionary force F predicts that an utterance containing that marker imposes
constitutive rules that are a superset of those imposed by F . Specifically, the
proposal in (37) predicts that one can never exclaim that p without asserting
that p. And this seems to be the case. In Vanderveken’s terms, the speech act
of exclaiming illocutionarily entails the speech act of assertion; if exclamation
requires that the speaker be surprised that p, it also requires that the speaker
believe that p.
This also seems to be the case for the attitude marker alas, given (39) (see
also (9)):
(39)
A: Alas, John arrived on time!
B: No he didn’t, he was 5 minutes late.
Following Vanderveken (1990), this is because alas modifies the sincerity conditions of assertion, as in (40).
(40)
Constitutive rules, alas
a. propositional content: any proposition p
b. preparatory conditions:
i) S has evidence that p; and
ii) S believes that H needs to know p
c. sincerity conditions:
i) S believes that p; and
ii) S regrets/is sad that p
d. essential conditions: counts as an undertaking that p represents an
actual state of affairs
This reflects a treatment of illocutionary content like speaker attitude as a
restriction on assertive speech acts, and (in turn) a characterization of attitude
markers as illocutionary force modifiers. The main benefit to this approach, as I
see it, is the characterization of the relative distribution of utterances that attitude markers and those that do not, across contexts. It provides an explanation
for why exclamations that p (and utterances of Alas, S ) are always assertions
that p (for p the propositional content of S).
This is the advantage I believe that Vanderveken’s approach has over a
natural alternative theory: one in which attitude markers are themselves illocutionary force operators or illocutionary mood markers.13 I see two ways of
implementing such an account: in one version, the exclamation operator in12 Although ‘sentence exclamations,’ exclamations formed from declarative sentences, differ
in this respect from exclamatives like What a great guy John is!, see Rett (2011).
13 Thanks to Liz Camp and David Braun (p.c.) for discussion here.
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troduces its own set of constitutive rules, and the utterance of an exclamation
results in multiple speech acts: an act of assertion as well as an act of exclamation. In the other version, the exclamation operator introduces its own
set of constitutive rules, and these rules are conjoined with those of assertion
(perhaps via a speech-act-level version of Predicate Modification), resulting in
a compound or conjoined speech act.
Either version of this approach is unappealing because it lacks this explanatory component of the modifier approach. It allows for an unattested independence between assertion and e.g. exclamation. It predicts that, in theory,
an exclamation could not or need not assert that p. It also predicts that, in
theory, the illocutionary content encoded in attitude markers could make the
same contribution in e.g. questions as it does in assertions. This is arguably not
predicted by the modifier approach, in which an attitude marker can be defined
as a partial function from illocutionary operators.
Is there, then, some use for the notion of a multiple speech act? There might
be, but it would, I think, look much different from e.g. an exclamation. Imagine
a context in which A is talking on the phone to B, who asks A whether she has
finished her paper. At the same time, C pops his head in the room to ask A
whether she has purchased her flight to the conference. Suppose the answer to
both of these questions is yes. Then arguably, in this context, A can make a
single utterance (Yes) which results in two different speech acts: the assertion
(to B) that she has finished her paper, and the assertion (to C) that she has
booked her flight.
A’s response arguably constitutes multiple speech acts because she could
have made an assertion to B without having made one to C, and vice-versa.
This is appropriate for the context above, but not for exclamations or other
utterances with attitude markers. In these cases, the resulting speech acts seem
to be composed in part of an act of assertion.14
I’ll sum up §3 before moving on to formalize the account presented here.
Attitude markers like the English alas encode information about the speaker’s
attitude towards the propositional, at-issue content of the utterance. The information it encodes is clearly not at-issue content, but I’ve additionally argued
that it’s not not-at-issue content, which is to say it differs from not-at-issue content like conventional implicature and presupposition. This is because it doesn’t
become hearer-oriented in questions (Faller, 2002), and because a speaker’s direct denial of the attitude information results in something like Moore’s Paradox
(rather than a contradiction). These claims are summarized in Table 4.
14 I won’t pursue it here, but it seems like we might be able to explain the relationship
between e.g. exclamation and assertion in terms of the semantic properties of the attitudes
expressed. In particular, it seems impossible for x to be surprised that p without believing
that p, and it seems impossible for x to regret that p without believing that p. An account
along these lines might also be co-opted to try to address the typology of attitude markers;
why, hypothetically, no language has an attitude marker that expresses that the speaker finds
it nauseating that p is possible.
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Table 4: the difference between expressives and attitude markers
John, that bastard, arrived on time Alas, J arrived on time
at-issue p = λw. john arrived on time in w
λw. john arrived on time in w
not-at-issue speaker thinks john is a bastard
illocutionary propose to add p to CG
propose to add p to CG
speaker is disappointed that p
Consequently, I’ve adopted Vanderveken’s (1990) proposal that attitude
markers like alas are illocutionary force modifiers: they denote partial functions from illocutionary force (e.g. assertion) to illocutionary force. As a result,
following Vanderveken’s principle in (33), they strengthen the e.g. sincerity conditions of illocutionary mood. This explains why their content is illocutionary,
and why utterances that include attitude markers “illocutionarily entail” assertions, i.e. impose restrictions that form a superset of those encoded in assertive
force.
I’d like to point out that encoding the meaning of attitude markers in illocutionary content does not preclude the content from interacting with information structure.15 In particular, it seems as though the proposition alas refers
to changes with its placement in the sentence (e.g. John arrived, alas, on time)
and focus. The same goes for exclamation intonation, compare Wow, JOHN
arrived on time! and Wow, John arrived on TIME! (Rett, 2011). A semantic
theory that makes different propositions available for propositional anaphora
depending on the information structure of the sentence, is in a good position to
account for (possibly, predict) these interactions.16
The paper can so far be seen as an expansion of Vanderveken (1990) in
terms of its empirical coverage and its explicit motivation. But it’s importance
to stress the need to encode attitude content semantically, instead of pragmatically. Searle’s and Vanderveken’s approach to speech acts does not lend itself
to lexically encoded illocutionary content. And it also does not clearly lend
itself to compositionality, which is crucial for an approach to attitude markers
as lexically encoding modificational content. In other words, the fact that illocutionary force and illocutionary force modifiers are lexically encoded across
languages calls for a semantics of illocutionary and expressive content.
I’d now like to consider its consequences for a recent set of very persuasive
semantic theories in which illocutionary force is treated in terms of Stalnakarian update. In particular, I’ll address the question: if attitude markers restrict
assertion with respect to the speaker’s attitude, how can we parlay their contribution into an update semantics?
15 This discussion was inspired by Sarah Murray’s presentation at the September 2013 Rutgers Semantics Workshop, and Larry Horn’s comments on it.
16 It may also be able to account for, as suggested by Sam Cumming (p.c.), the observation
that e.g. alas seems to be able to modify not-at-issue content in sentences like Bill’s tennis
coach, alas not his dentist, extracted his tooth.
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4
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A Stalnakarian approach to illocutionary force
modifiers
Stalnaker (1978) proposed that the contribution of assertions could be modeled
at the level of discourse, in terms of the common ground (CG) – the set of
propositions the conversational participants mutually assume to be taken for
granted – and updates to the CG. Recent work has extended this theory formally
and empirically (e.g. Ginzburg, 1996; Asher and Lascarides, 2003; Farkas and
Bruce, 2010; Murray, 2010, 2013). In many of these theories, to assert that p is
to propose that p be added to the CG. (Not-at-issue content, in contrast, can
be characterized as automatically updating the CG, as in Murray 2010, 2013
and AnderBois et al. 2010, 2013.)
The idea that attitude markers introduce illocutionary content that reflects
the speaker’s attitudes (expectations and emotions) poses at least an initial
challenge to this perspective. If illocutionary force effects the common ground
(by proposing to add to or structure it), what happens when we restrict that
force with respect to the speaker’s attitude?
In the account proposed above, attitude markers don’t add a new kind of
information to the speech act, they add to the sincerity conditions already encoded in the speech act. I take for granted, following Searle (1969), that assertion encodes a sincerity condition – that the speaker believes that p – as well
as an essential condition, the effect on the context of asserting that p. So in a
way, attitude markers don’t create but instead highlight a larger puzzle: how
do we encode sincerity conditions in a compositional approach to illocutionary
content?
I’ll begin this section by briefly reviewing two theories that differentiate between the three tiers of semantic content assumed in §3: Farkas and Bruce (2010)
and Murray (2010, 2013). (Others, like Potts 2005 and AnderBois et al. 2010,
2013, propose similar treatments of not-at-issue content but, not my knowledge,
do not have positive views about illocutionary content.) In §4.2 I’ll expand
on the concept of participants’ discourse commitments – originally inspired by
Gunlogson (2001) – to represent sincerity conditions as illocutionary content.
4.1
A formal foundation
Drawing from her work on evidentials in Cheyenne in Murray (2010, 2011),
Murray (2013) presents a comprehensive theory of illocutionary mood in an
update semantics couched in the formalism of DPL. In her system, the utterance
of an assertion does a number of things at once.
1. presents the at-issue proposition: defines the at-issue proposition p
and the discourse referents it introduces;
2. restricts with not-at-issue content: directly updates the common
ground with the not-at-issue proposition q;
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3. relates the at-issue content to the context: proposes to update the
common ground with the at-issue proposition p
That assertions effectively propose to update the CG (instead of directly
updating it) comes, as far as I can tell, from Clark (1992); Ginzburg (1996) and
is motivated by the observation that assertions can be denied in discourse. As we
saw, not-at-issue content cannot be denied in discourse; this is part of Murray’s
motivation for treating not-at-issue content (e.g. the contribution of Cheyenne
evidentials) as a direct update to the CG. It is the illocutionary relation – the
proposal to add p to the common ground – that is contributed by illocutionary
mood like declarative markers.
(41) illustrates her formalism for an utterance of a Cheyenne evidential sentence with the propositional content ‘Sandy won’ and the not-at-issue restriction
that the speaker had direct evidence for the propositional content.
(41)
In Murray’s theory, interrogative mood updates the common ground in a different way; by structuring it into possible answers.
Farkas and Bruce (2010) propose a very similar system but are not explicit
about the role of not-at-issue content.17 For reasons that will become clear
shortly, I will adopt their theory, but supplement it with a treatment of notat-issue content based on Murray’s insights (see also AnderBois et al., 2010,
2013).
Farkas and Bruce’s theory, too, treats assertions as proposals to update the
CG with the at-issue proposition. They define speech acts as functions from
input discourse structures Ki to output discourse structures Ko ; a subcomponent of any discourse structure is a (possibly empty) set of propositions that
are under consideration for addition to the CG. This set is called a projection
set, and an assertion that p adds p to the input ps.
They summarize this component of their analysis as follows (p.88):
“[A]n assertion projects confirmation in that it projects a future
common ground that includes the asserted proposition. A question
projects resolution in the sense that it projects a set of future common grounds arrived at by adding to each common ground in the
input ps each (contextually) possible answer to the question. Assertions and questions are similar in that their effect on the ps is to
17 They
say (p.94), “Finally, let us note that assertions, as well as questions and other
speech acts, are associated not only with literal content but with implicated content as well.
We suggest that implicated content is added on the Table conjoined with but separated from
the literal content making it possible for further moves to react to both implicated and literal
content.”
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add their denotations to the elements of the input ps. They differ in
that for assertions, only one proposition is added and therefore only
one resolution is projected, while in the case of questions one adds
a non-singleton set of propositions, thus projecting a non-singleton
set of resolutions.”
They use the notion of a stack (i.e. a Table T ) to model salience in discourse
(Ginzburg, 1996; Roberts, 1996). In addition to effecting the common ground,
utterances can also raise discourse referents to salience, and they do so in this
theory by pushing the drefs to the top of the Table.
One other important innovation of their approach is the incorporation of
the notion of a participant’s discourse commitments as a set of propositions
tracked throughout the conversation but distinct from the CG. They characterize the distinction as follows (p.85):
“The discourse commitment set of a participant A at a time t in a
conversation c contains those propositions A has publicly committed
to in the course of c up to t and which have not (yet) become mutual
commitments. The CG, on the other hand, is that set of propositions
that have been agreed upon by all participants in c at t together with
the propositions that represent the shared background knowledge of
the discourse participants.”
They cite Gunlogson (2001) and Walker (1996) as inspirations for this notion.
Elsewhere (p.86), they define a participant’s ‘total discourse commitments’
as the union of her DC set with the CG.
To summarize, the theory in Farkas and Bruce (2010) relies on characterizing
several different subcomponents of a given discourse structure K:
1. the common ground (CG), the set of propositions corresponding already
confirmed by the discourse participants (including their mutual beliefs);
2. sets of discourse commitments (DC): for each participant x, the set
of propositions x has publicly committed to during the conversation;
3. the Table T , modelling discourse salience;
4. the projection set (ps), the set of beliefs that are being considered for
addition into the CG.
Farkas and Bruce (2010) adopt from Krifka (2001) a particular formulation
of speech act operators in which they take sentences as arguments and denote
functions from input to output context states. The assertion operator is defined
over a sentence S (with declarative force D), a speaker or author a and a
discourse structure Ki ; its output is a discourse structure Ko such that Ko is
restricted as in (42).
(42)
Assertion operator (A), for sentences S with at-issue content p:
A(S[D], a, Ki ) = Ko such that
(Farkas and Bruce, 2010, 92)
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Jessica Rett
(i) DCa,o = DCa,i ∪ {p}
(ii) To = push(hS[D]; {p}i, Ti )
(iii) pso = psi ∪ {p}
Step (i) in (42) models the addition of the at-issue content p (the propositional content of the sentence S) to the set of propositions representing the
speaker’s discourse commitments, those propositions the speaker has publicly
committed to during the conversation. This is a subcomponent of the speech act
of assertion not represented in Murray’s theory, for better or for worse. In the
next section, I’ll treat it as a version of Searle’s sincerity condition on assertion
(that the speaker believes that p).
Step (ii) in (42) represents that the utterance of S[D] makes salient the
proposition p; it defines the output stack To as the input stack Ti with p pushed
on top. Step (iii) represents the illocutionary content of assertion, using the
notion of an input (psi ) and output (po ) projection set.18 These propositions
can then be added to the CG or eliminated throughout the discourse. This is
equivalent to Murray’s proposal that the utterance of an assertion amounts to
a proposal to update the CG with the at-issue proposition p.
We can supplement (42) with Murray’s treatment of not-at-issue content by
adding a line that a not-at-issue proposition q directly updates the CG. Assuming that CG is (in addition to ps and DC) a subcomponent of the discourse
structure K, this step looks like this:
(43)
Assertion operator (A), for sentences S with at-issue content p and
not-at-issue content q:
A(S[D], a, Ki ) = Ko such that
(i) DCa,o = DCa,i ∪ {p}
(ii) To = push(hS[D]; {p}i, Ti )
(iii) pso = psi ∪ {p}
(iv) CGo = CGi ∪ {q}
Farkas and Bruce’s polar question operator PQ takes an interrogative sentence and a discourse structure Ki as its arguments. It also raises the issue of
whether p by adding p and ¬p to the stack, in (44) (i). It proposes, in (ii), that
the interlocutors accept either that p or that ¬p.
(44)
Polar question operator (PQ)
PQ(S[I], Ki ) = Ko such that
(i) To = push(hS[I]; {p, ¬p}i, Ti )
(ii) pso = psi ∪ {p, ¬p}
(Farkas and Bruce, 2010, 95)
The relevant difference between the two illocutionary force operators, for
the discussion at hand, is that assertion deals with a singleton set of propositions, while the polar question operator does not. To accommodate not-at-issue
content in questions, we can also add to (44) a step similar to Step (iv) in (43).
18 ∪
represents set union minus the elimination of inconsistent propositions, p.90.
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Jessica Rett
These illocutionary force modifiers, as they’re defined, make predictions
about the sort of content an utterance makes salient (e.g. a proposition p) and
the sort of effect that utterance has on the common ground, by virtue of what
it adds to the projection set. This allows Farkas and Bruce to model discourse
reference to propositions, as many dynamic accounts do, as well as the discourse effect of question responses, which can result in part in the acceptance
of projection set propositions to the common ground (à la Stalnaker).
Farkas and Bruce (2010) foresee the need to extend their relatively focused
semantics:
“For the matters we discuss here, further additions to context structure such as the agendas of participants or representations of their
private doxastic states are not necessary. The model we provide is
consistent with expansion in these directions, as well as with additions of finer-grained structures for dealing with anaphoric relations.” (Farkas and Bruce, 2010, 89)
One way of reading this quote is as referencing Searle’s sincerity condition
on assertion, namely that the speaker believe that p. I’ll reiterate that this commitment is not explicitly modelled in either of these approaches to illocutionary
mood. Both theories assume that illocutionary force needs to be represented semantically because it is encoded lexically or morphologically. And both assume
that this can be successfully done in dynamic semantics in terms of Stalnakarian
update. But if the commitment that the speaker believes that p is in fact a part
of the illocutionary content of an assertion – nevermind the content of attitude
markers like alas – how can we supplement these theories to represent sincerity
conditions in illocutionary content? Before presenting a positive proposal, I’ll
mention and reject two possible responses to this question.
One option is that the CG is one of at least two sets of propositions that participants need to track; the other involves the participants’ attitudes. In other
words, if assertion in a Stalnakarian semantics involves a proposal to update
the CG with p, then perhaps an utterance of Alas, S involves a CG proposal
as well as an addition to the “attitudinal common ground” of the proposition
q (namely, that the speaker is sad or surprised that p). The utterance of a
sentence containing an attitude marker updates one component of the context
(the CG) with its at-issue proposition p, and it updates another component of
the context (the attitudinal CG) with a proposition of the form, ‘The speaker
feels A about p.’ In this approach, participants track each others’ attitudes in
addition to their epistemic commitments.
I find it extremely unappealing to multiply the sets of propositions that
reflect the public commitments of a discourse. I’ve discussed one type of illocutionary force modifier here; others have argued that other types exists, e.g.
evidentials in Cuzco Quechua (Faller, 2002). If each type of illocutionary force
modifier requires its own version of the common ground, there is in principle no
end to the bundles of information interlocutors would have to track.
A second option involves treating sincerity conditions as presuppositions. If
a sincerity condition is a precondition on the felicitous utterance of a sentence,
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Jessica Rett
and presuppositions are preconditions on the truth of an assertion, it might be
tempting to assimilate the two.
There are two considerations against this possibility. First, as I argued in
§3, illocutionary content behaves different in crucial ways from not-at-issue content like presuppositions. This approach wouldn’t be able to account for these
differences. Second, in a Stalnakarian update semantics, presuppositions are
satisfied iff its content is in the CG (or, in the exceptional case, accommodated
by being added to the CG). This doesn’t seem like the right approach for illocutionary content, especially the meaning of attitude markers, which seems to
be expressive as opposed to descriptive (Kaplan, 1999). Presuppositions seem
public in a sense that the speaker’s attitude does not.
In the following section I present an analysis of attitude markers by treating
sincerity conditions as part of the speaker’s discourse commitments. I argue
that this accounts for the illocutionary nature of the content of attitude markers
because it is introduced as a restriction on the speaker’s commitments in the
discourse, instead of e.g. public knowledge or proposed content.
4.2
Sincerity conditions in Stalnakarian update
I’ve noted above that there are, technically speaking, differences between Searle’s
sincerity condition on assertion (that the speaker believe that p) and the Gunlogson/Farkas/Bruce characterization of an assertion adding p to the speaker’s
set of discourse commitments. This is because publically committing to a proposition p doesn’t reduce to believing that p (and vice versa).
And in fact, the original motivation for the addition of p to a speaker’s
DC set didn’t pertain to considerations of illocutionary content but rather to
empirical considerations about speaker bias in the use of declaratives and polar
questions in discourse. Gunlogson (2002), for instance, it’s used to explain when
declaratives can and cannot be used as questions (e.g. That’s a persimmon? ).
The clear differences between believing that p and publically committing that
p could perhaps be used to argue that the theory in Farkas and Bruce (2010)
needs to be supplemented to include Searle’s sincerity condition on assertion.
But I will instead propose here that the two are closely enough related that we
can treat public commitment as a proxy for belief, and additionally use DCs to
model the contribution of attitude markers.
In particular, I’ll suggest that to publically commit to p is, effectively, to
communicate that you believe that p. This isn’t always the case, but it is
(arguably) a reliable correlation in cases in which the speaker is being sincere.
In other words: in contexts in which the speaker is being sincere (or in which the
hearer assumes the speaker is sincere), the speaker’s publicly committing to p
amounts to the speaker’s assurance she believes that p. If this is right, then the
assertion operator proposed by Farkas and Bruce (2010) ((43)) models, perhaps
indirectly, Searle’s sincerity condition on assertion.
This suggests that DC sets are useful for modelling sincerity conditions;
given the argument that attitude markers contribute a sincerity condition to
an utterance, I propose to encode their meaning with respect to a speaker’s
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Jessica Rett
discourse commitments. I’ll model this approach on alas, but intend it to be
generalizable to, at least, exclamation intonation, Finnish -pä, and the mirative
interpretation of the Cheyenne mirative evidential.
I define alas as a relation between a force operator F and its arguments
(S, a, w@ , Ki ).
(45)
alas(F)(S, a, w@ , Ki ) = Ko such that
(i) F(S, a, w@ , Ki ) = Ko
(ii) DCa,o = DCa,i ∪
{a is disappointed that p in w@ , for ιp such that To = push(hS; {p}i; Ti )}
Step (i) in (45) returns the conditions originally imposed by Fi , those listed in
(43). Step (ii) adds an additional condition on the output of the illocutionary
force operator: that it update the speaker’s DC set with the proposition that
she is disappointed by the at-issue proposition in the world of utterance.
Because it is an update restriction, the information encoded in (45) is compatible with Stalnakarian semantic treatments of illocutionary mood. But because it updates the speaker’s DC, rather than the CG, the meaning of attitude
markers is importantly distinct from e.g. not-at-issue content. It is indexical to
the speaker and the world of utterance.
As before, because her interlocutors aren’t necessarily privvy to the speaker’s
beliefs and feelings, the utterance of an assertion S[D] or an attitude assertion
Alas, S[D] can be interpreted as the speaker expressing that she believes and
holds a particular disposition towards p. If the speaker explicitly denies their
content, as in the Moore’s Paradox case in (28), then interlocutors know that
this requirement is not satisfied, resulting in a dysfunctional speech act (perhaps
as the result of Gricean concerns).
There is one more important component of Step (ii) in (45): the sincerity
condition introduced by alas itself presupposes that the utterance is associated
with a unique at-issue proposition p. This doesn’t seem terribly stipulative: it
doesn’t seem possible (or at least rational) to be e.g. disappointed in a set of
alternative propositions. This correctly predicts, at least given the characterization of the polar question operator PQ in (44), that attitude markers are
unacceptable in questions, or any other construction associated with more than
one propositional alternative.
There is additional evidence that this is a happy result. Recent work in
alternative semantics (Alonso-Ovalle, 2006, among others) and inquisitive semantics (Groenendijk, 2009, among others) have proposed treating (many cases
of) disjunction as similar to polar questions in just this respect. Alonso-Ovalle
(2006), for instance, adopts a Hamblin sematics in which sentences denote sets of
propositions; in certain contexts, disjunctive sentences can denote a set of multiple propositions (i.e. multiple alternatives) instead of a singleton set. If these
approaches are right, (45) predicts that e.g. alas is unacceptable in alternativeprojecting disjunctive sentences in just the same way they’re unacceptable in
polar questions. And this seems to be the case:
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(46)
Jessica Rett
a. #(Wow,) John rode his bike or arrived on time!
b. #Alas, John rode his bike or arrived on time.
I’ll also add that the formulation in (45), combined with an explicit semantics about information structure, allows for the possibility that the at-issue
proposition p can be effected by things like focus or syntactic prominence. This
is a welcome potential result given the discussion under Table 4 in §3.3. It also
provides a possible explanation for the data in (22), repeated below, if correct:
(47)
a. ??Alas/*fortunately, has John arrived on time?
b. Has John arrived on time, ??alas/*fortunately?
c. *Alas/*fortunately, when did John arrive?
d. When did John arrive, *alas/*fortunately?
A theory better supplemented with a story about discourse prominence could
potentially allow for differences between alas and fortunately in terms of whether
they can be anaphoric to propositional drefs other than those introduced by the
utterance itself.
The proposal here can be summarized as follows: natural language provides
some motivation for encoding illocutionary mood in a compositional semantics;
attitude markers add to this motivation. Recent compositional semantic treatments of e.g. assertion treat it as a proposal to update the common ground
with the at-issue or propositional content p (and as directly updating the CG
with the not-at-issue content q). These proposals raise the question about what
to do with sincerity conditions: Searle’s claim that an assertion that p commits the speaker to the belief that p, or my claim that an utterance of Alas, S
additionally commits the speaker to being disappointed that p.
I’ve co-opted Gunlogson’s and Farkas and Bruce’s notion of a speaker’s discourse commitments to attempt to model both Searle’s sincerity condition on
assertion and the illocutionary content I claim attitude markers encode. This
requires the assumption that the addition of p to a speaker’s DC amounts, in
the general case, to a commitment that the speaker believes that p. I’ve also
proposed that attitude markers contribute information about the speaker’s attitudes towards the at-issue content in a speaker’s DC. Because it still relies on
an update semantics, this way of encoding illocutionary content is compatible
with semantic theories currently on the market. But because it references the
speaker’s discourse commitments, it appropriately predicts a difference between
not-at-issue and illocutionary content.
5
Conclusion
I’ll end by summarizing the main points of the paper. We need room in our
compositional semantics for a particular kind of morpheme, which I’ve called
attitude markers. Examples are alas, fortunately, English exclamation intonation, Finnish -pä, and mirative evidentials. In typical cases, these markers all
attribute to the speaker a particular attitude towards the propositional content
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Michigan Philosophy and Linguistics Workshop
Jessica Rett
p of the utterance. In many of the cases discussed, the attitude is one of surprise
that p is true. In other cases, it is that the speaker is disappointed (e.g. alas)
or relieved (e.g. fortunately) that p is true.
These attitude markers are similar in many ways to the class of expressives
introduced in Potts (2005, 2007). Potts argued that prenominal expressives like
damn and bastard introduce speaker-oriented not-at-issue content, encoded in a
conventional implicature, similarly to appositives or unrestricted relative clauses
as in John, who I don’t like,.... The two classes of expression are similar in
that they do not contribute to at-issue or propositional content; they generally
express the speaker’s attitude towards (some aspect of) the propositional content
of the utterance; and their content is projectable and non-deniable, etc.
I argue here that there are nevertheless differences between expressives and
attitude markers. In particular, I concede that the former encode their meaning
in conventional implicature (or at least in not-at-issue content), while the latter
encode their meaning in illocutionary content. I have two arguments for this
distinction. First, while not-at-issue content generally participates in interrogative flip, wherein the content becomes hearer-oriented in questions, attitude
markers are ungrammatical or unacceptable in questions. Second, while the denial of the content encoded in expressives (and other not-at-issue content, like
evidentiality) results in contradiction, denial of the content encoded in attitude
markers patterns like other illocutionary content in leading to Moore’s Paradox.
Consequently, I follow the suggestion in Vanderveken (1990) that attitude
markers are modifiers of illocutionary force operators like declarative markers
(in e.g. Tsafiki) or declarative intonation (in e.g. English). In particular, they
modify illocutionary mood by adding a sincerity condition on the speech act.
Because this information is lexically encoded, I argue for the need to implement the approach in a compositional, Stalnakarian semantics, as opposed to a
Searlean theory of speech acts.
I adopt a three-tiered semantic theory based on work by Farkas and Bruce
(2010) and Murray (2010, 2013) to formalize the contribution of attitude markers as illocutionary force modifiers. I introduce sincerity conditions into these
approaches via a set of propositions corresponding to the speaker’s commitments
in the discourse (DC). The inclusion of p into this set approximates Searle’s
sincerity condition on assertion – that the speaker believe that p – and the inclusion of the proposition that the speaker holds a particular attitude toward
p into the DC allows for a way of encoding the content of attitude markers
in illocutionary content. Because attitude markers introduce the requirement
that the speaker feel a particular way in the utterance world towards a unique
at-issue proposition p, we can explain the unacceptability of attitude markers
in questions and disjunctive sentences.
I’ll briefly highlight some areas for possible improvement or extension. My
claim that there is a testable and contentful difference between not-at-issue and
illocutionary content rests on only two empirical tests, and one of these tests
itself relies on a very subtle distinction between contradiction and a violation of
Moore’s Paradox. Given that there are many semantic theories now committed
to a distinction between these two types of content, it would be extremely
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Michigan Philosophy and Linguistics Workshop
Jessica Rett
beneficial to attempt to find other ways they can be distinguished empirically.
In §2 I introduced a number of different morphemes under the umbrella of
attitude markers. But I have tested only a strict subset of these markers (alas
and fortunately; English exclamation intonation; Finnish -pä and Cheyenne
mirative evidentials, in Rett and Murray 2013) with respect to the difference
between not-at-issue content. It’s entirely possible that (some of) the other
markers I mentioned, e.g. German sau or Mandarin jingran, encode speaker
attitude in not-at-issue content (as has been argued in Wu, 2008; Gutzmann,
2011). In §3.2, I argued that this seems to be the case for the English appositive
lo and behold.
Finally, I’ve assumed that the content encoded in attitude markers is by
default speaker-oriented, but that there is a pragmatic process by which they
can be anchored to a different individual in specific contexts. This directly
follows the treatment of expressive and other not-at-issue content in e.g. Harris
and Potts (2009) and AnderBois et al. (2013). It is however tricky to defend
this proposal against the claim that this type of meaning isn’t (necessarily)
speaker-oriented in the first place. I have argued that illocutionary content
is just intrinsically speaker-oriented, but of course it would be ideal to have
stronger motivation for this commitment.
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