9:00 COFFEE
9:15-10:00 Corien Bary and Emar Maier "Backgrounding and commitment in parenthetical reports and reportative evidentials"
10:00-11:15 Todor Koev "Parentheticality and Discourse"
15' COFFEE
11:30-12:45 Julie Hunter "On the discourse function of parenthetical reports"
1hr LUNCH
13:45-15:00 Martina Faller "Reportative evidentials and speaker commitment in discourse"
15' COFFEE
15:15-15:50 Leopold Hess "The Epistemology of Testimony and Backgrounded Reports"
15:50-17:05 Regine Eckardt "Trust the speaker?!"
17:05 Plenary discussion
- Regine Eckardt "Trust the speaker?!"
Assertion is a complex communicative act. The speaker puts a proposition on the table and (a) commits herself to it and (b) asks the addressee to accept it. In indirect reports two speakers are in play, the external speaker who reports, and the protagonist who said or thought. We get the following possible communicative games:
It may seem as if we can distinguish between 1 and 2 only on basis of plausibility considerations. Still, certain data show that the external speaker’s distrust in 2. can become linguistically manifest. ... read full abstract (pdf)
- Martina Faller "Reportative evidentials and speaker commitment in discourse"
Reportative exceptionality (AnderBois 2014) refers to the observation that, in many languages with grammatical evidentials, a speaker uttering a reportative declarative sentence with propositional content p, does not need to be committed to the truth of p and may in fact be committed to the falsity of p. This contrasts with direct or inferential evidential sentences, where the speaker has to be committed to at least the possibility of p. For example, in Cuzco Quechua (Faller 2002), sequences like (1) are perfectly felicitous, and there is no sense of the speaker contradicting themselves, as there would be if the Reportative was replaced with a non-reportative evidential.
(1) Pay-kuna=s qulqi-ta saqiy-wa-n. Mana=ma, ni un sol-ta saqi-sha-wa-n=chu.
(s)he-PL=REP money-ACC leave-1o-3 no=IMPR not one Sol-ACC leave-PROG-1O-3=NEG
‘They left me money (I was told)’. (But) no, they didn’t leave me one sol.’
Yet, the propositional content of reportative sentences is proffered as at-issue content. That is, both propositional contents in (1) are possible answers to the implicit question under discussion of whether the people referred to by “they” gave the speaker money. The speaker, however, only proposes to add the second one to the common ground. ... read full abstract (pdf)
- Julie Hunter "On the discourse function of parenthetical reports"
My talk examines the contribution of parenthetical reports to the structure and interpretation of discourse. In particular, I review various efforts to define the discourse function of parenthetical reports within frameworks of rhetorical structure. After bringing out several conflicts between proposed treatments of parenthetical reports and independently motivated features of rhetorical frameworks, I propose an analysis within the rhetorical framework of SDRT that avoids these conflicts. Finally, I compare the rhetorical approach to other extant accounts of evidentials.
- Todor Koev "Parentheticality and Discourse"
Sentences with slifting parentheticals (e.g. "The dean, Susan said, flirted with the secretary") span the divide between semantics and pragmatics because in such sentences the main clause plays a central role while the slifting parenthetical describes the grounds for asserting the main clause (cf. Urmson 1952; Hooper 1975; Asher 2000; Rooryck 2001; Jayez & Rossari 2004; Davis et al. 2007; Simons 2007; Scheffler 2009; Haddican et al. 2014). In this talk, I will discuss three core properties of sentences with slifting parentheticals: (i) the often weakened assertion strength of the main clause, (ii) the backgrounded status and projection properties of slifting parentheticals, and (iii) the requirement that slifting parentheticals create an upward-monotone environment (cf. #"The dean, Susan doubts, flirted with the secretary"). I will argue against the idea that the main clause is interpreted in the scope of the slifting predicate. Rather, I suggest that the strength of the main clause depends in a quasi-pragmatic way on the slifting parenthetical, since the latter can lower the assertability threshold for the main clause. I will also try to derive the informational/projection properties and the polarity restrictions on slifting parentheticals from their role as providing grounds for the main claim of the sentence.