The event will be held via Zoom: ubc.zoom.us/j/64763345823.The passcode is 635410. (The meeting ID is 647 6334 5823.)
Donka Farkas (University of California Santa Cruz) will present a colloquium entitled, “Canonical and non-canonical questions and assertions”.
Canonical and non-canonical questions and assertions
The general issue addressed in this talk is how best to characterize canonical and non-canonical
speech acts. The framework I will use is rooted in Farkas and Bruce [2010] and Farkas and Roelofsen
[2017]. The speech acts I concentrate on are assertions and questions.
The rst part of the talk focuses on canonical assertions and questions. Pretheoretically, canon-
ical, or typical, assertions are informing speech acts whereby a knowledgeable speaker informs her
addressee of the truth of the proposition she expresses. Canonical, or typical, questions request
information, i.e., an ignorant speaker requests her addressee to resolve the issue she raises. The
question addressed in this part of the talk is why should canonical assertions and questions have
these properties? I will attempt to answer it by showing that these properties follow from a context
structure view based on Farkas and Bruce [2010] and the basic conventional discourse e ects (cde)
declaratives and interrogatives are assigned in Farkas and Roelofsen [2017]. cde are de ned as
functions from the denotation of sentences and input context structures to output context struc-
tures. These functions a ect the discourse commitments of the speaker, the conversational table
and the future states of the conversation the move projects.
The second part of the talk considers ways in which assertions and questions are expected to be
non-canonical in this approach, i.e., ways in which declaratives and interrogatives can be used in
contexts that override the canonical default assumptions discussed in the rst part. The framework
predicts that such non-default cases can be either unmarked (as in the case of `quiz’ questions in
English) or marked for various types of particular deviations from the canonical case, such as
markers of bias in questions, which signal a departure from the speaker neutrality assumption
in questions, or markers of non-categorical commitment, which signal departures from speaker
knowledgeability in assertions. It will be argued that a promising way of treating some of the
linguistic means used in non-canonical speech acts is to treat them as force modi ers, i.e. as
contributing special cde, treated formally as functions from contexts c to contexts c0, where c is
the result of applying the basic cde of the sentence to its input context. (see Faller [2002], Murray
[2010]).
References
Martina Faller. Semantics and pragmatics of evidentials in Cuzco Quechua. PhD thesis, Stanford
University, 2002.
Donka F. Farkas and Kim B. Bruce. On reacting to assertions and polar questions. Journal of
semantics, 27:81{118, 2010.
Donka F. Farkas and Floris Roelofsen. Division of labor in the interpretation of declaratives and
interrogatives. Journal of Semantics, 34(2):237{289, 2017. doi: 10.1093/jos/ w012.
Sarah Murray. Evidentiality and the structure of speech acts. PhD thesis, Rutgers University, 2010.