In linguistics, a rising declarative is an utterance which has the syntactic form of a declarative but the rising intonation typically associated with polar interrogatives. [1]
- Rising declarative: Justin Bieber wants to hang out with me?
- Falling declarative: Justin Bieber wants to hang out with me.
- Polar question: Does Justin Bieber want to hang out with me?
This feature exists, for example, in English and Russian.
Research on rising declaratives has suggested that they fall into two categories, assertive rising declaratives and inquisitive rising declaratives. These categories are distinguished both by the particulars of their pitch contours and their conventional discourse effects. However, the distinction in pitch contour is not categorical, varying between speakers and overridable by context. [1]
Assertive rising declaratives are characterized phonologically by a high pitch accent which rises to a high boundary tone, notated as H* H-H% in the ToBI system. Assertive rising declaratives are assertion-like in that they provide the addressee with information. However, they also convey that the speaker is uncertain about some aspect of how their utterance fits in the discourse. For instance, in the following example, B is understood as effectively asserting that they do indeed speak Ladino while conveying uncertainty about whether speaking Ladino counts as speaking Spanish. [1] [2] [3]
- A: Do you speak Spanish?
B: I speak Ladino? [2]
Inquisitive rising declaratives are characterized phonologically by a low pitch accent which rises to a high boundary tone, or L* H-H% in the ToBI system. Their discourse effects are similar to biased questions in that they seek information from the addressee while conveying that the speaker already have certain expectations. For instance, in the following example, B conveys incredulity at the notion that John has a sister and invites A to confirm it. [1] [4]
- A: John went to pick up his sister.
B: John has a sister?? [5]
There is no consensus on how rising declaratives come to have their observed discourse effects. Different researchers come to different conclusions about whether the two kinds of rising declaratives have the same semantic content, and some analyses cover only one or the other category. [1] In work such as Jeong (2018), the two kinds of utterances are treated as having different semantic content, assertive rising declaratives having bona fide declarative denotations and inquisitive rising declaratives having bona fide interrogative denotations. In such accounts, their respective discourse effects arise from the interaction between these denotations and pragmatic reasoning or conventions of use. [1] [6]
However, other work has proposed unified accounts. For instance, Westera (2013) argues that rising intonation conveys that the speaker isn't sure whether their utterance is in accordance with Gricean Maxims. On this account, all rising declaratives have the same semantic content but end up with different discourse effects depending on which maxim the speaker worries they are violating. In the assertive example above, the maxim would be the Maxim of Relevance. In the inquisitive case above, it would be the Maxim of Quality. [1] [7] [8]
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).
In linguistics, deixis is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words tomorrow, there, and they. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denoted meaning varies depending on time and/or place. Words or phrases that require contextual information to be fully understood—for example, English pronouns—are deictic. Deixis is closely related to anaphora. Although this article deals primarily with deixis in spoken language, the concept is sometimes applied to written language, gestures, and communication media as well. In linguistic anthropology, deixis is treated as a particular subclass of the more general semiotic phenomenon of indexicality, a sign "pointing to" some aspect of its context of occurrence.
In spoken language analysis, an utterance is a continuous piece of speech, by one person, before or after which there is silence on the part of the person. In the case of oral languages, it is generally, but not always, bounded by silence. Utterances do not exist in written language; only their representations do. They can be represented and delineated in written language in many ways.
In linguistics and philosophy, the denotation of an expression is its literal meaning. For instance, the English word "warm" denotes the property of having high temperature. Denotation is contrasted with other aspects of meaning including connotation. For instance, the word "warm" may evoke calmness or coziness, but these associations are not part of the word's denotation. Similarly, an expression's denotation is separate from pragmatic inferences it may trigger. For instance, describing something as "warm" often implicates that it is not hot, but this is once again not part of the word's denotation.
A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammatical forms typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are interrogative in form but may not be considered bona fide questions, as they are not expected to be answered.
The concept of illocutionary acts was introduced into linguistics by the philosopher J. L. Austin in his investigation of the various aspects of speech acts. In his framework, locution is what was said and meant, illocution is what was done, and perlocution is what happened as a result.
In semiotics, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy of language, indexicality is the phenomenon of a sign pointing to some element in the context in which it occurs. A sign that signifies indexically is called an index or, in philosophy, an indexical.
In linguistics, focus is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed prosodically by a pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person Mary insulted. By contrast, in the sentence "Mary only INSULTED Bill", the verb "insult" is focused and thus expresses that Mary performed no other actions towards Bill. Focus is a cross-linguistic phenomenon and a major topic in linguistics. Research on focus spans numerous subfields including phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics.
In linguistics, prosody is the study of elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments but which are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, stress, and rhythm. Such elements are known as suprasegmentals.
In the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, a presupposition is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. Examples of presuppositions include:
Relevance theory is a framework for understanding the interpretation of utterances. It was first proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, and is used within cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. The theory was originally inspired by the work of Paul Grice and developed out of his ideas, but has since become a pragmatic framework in its own right. The seminal book, Relevance, was first published in 1986 and revised in 1995.
In linguistics, intonation is the variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse. For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is interpreted as a yes-or-no question when it is uttered with a single rising intonation contour, but is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "Spanish" and a falling contour on "French". Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, its effects almost always work hand-in-hand with other prosodic features. Intonation is distinct from tone, the phenomenon where pitch is used to distinguish words or to mark grammatical features.
In linguistic pragmatics, the term metalocutionary act is sometimes used for a speech act that refers to the forms and functions of the discourse itself rather than continuing the substantive development of the discourse.
In linguistics, information structure, also called information packaging, describes the way in which information is formally packaged within a sentence. This generally includes only those aspects of information that "respond to the temporary state of the addressee's mind", and excludes other aspects of linguistic information such as references to background (encyclopedic/common) knowledge, choice of style, politeness, and so forth. For example, the difference between an active clause and a corresponding passive is a syntactic difference, but one motivated by information structuring considerations. Other structures motivated by information structure include preposing and inversion.
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal tools from logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. It provides accounts of what linguistic expressions mean and how their meanings are composed from the meanings of their parts. The enterprise of formal semantics can be thought of as that of reverse-engineering the semantic components of natural languages' grammars.
In linguistics, givenness is a phenomenon in which a speaker assumes that contextual information of a topic of discourse is already known to the listener. The speaker thus considers it unnecessary to supply further contextual information through an expression's linguistic properties, its syntactic form or position, or its patterns of stress and intonation. Givenness involves contextual information in a discourse that is given, or assumed to be known, by the addressee in the moment of utterance. Therefore, a given expression must be known from prior discourse.
Gregory Ward is an American linguist, academic and researcher. He is Professor of Linguistics, Gender & Sexuality Studies and, by courtesy, Philosophy at Northwestern University.
In formal semantics, the squiggle operator is an operator that constrains the occurrence of focus. In one common definition, the squiggle operator takes a syntactic argument and a discourse salient argument and introduces a presupposition that the ordinary semantic value of is either a subset or an element of the focus semantic value of . The squiggle was first introduced by Mats Rooth in 1992 as part of his treatment of focus within the framework of alternative semantics. It has become one of the standard tools in formal work on focus, playing a key role in accounts of contrastive focus, ellipsis, deaccenting, and question-answer congruence.
In semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, the common ground of a conversation is the set of propositions that the interlocutors have agreed to treat as true. For a proposition to be in the common ground, it must be common knowledge in the conversational context. The set of possible worlds compatible with the common ground is often called the context set.
An echo question is a question that seeks to confirm or clarify another speaker's utterance, by repeating it back in some form. For example:
A: I'm moving to Greenland. B: You're moving where??
