Abstract
Previous work on rising declaratives has argued that some have an inquisitive interpretation similar to polar questions, and that this meaning is intonationally distinguished by a steep final rise to a high boundary tone, while others have an assertive interpretation, similar to assertions of falling declaratives, that has a shallower final rise to a lower, high boundary tone. I demonstrate that this strict form-meaning correlation does not hold because there are inquisitive rising declaratives that have a shallow final rise. I argue for a unified theory of rising declaratives with enough interpretational flexibility to explain these crosscutting patterns.
Highlights
Rising declaratives provide a useful test case for theories of the semanticspragmatics interface that aim to explain why the main clause types, when they are the root clause, are canonically linked to certain discourse functions
Some argue that declaratives are designated for assertions by an illocutionary force operator or an extra-grammatical convention of use (e.g. Gunlogson 2003; Lauer 2013; a.o.), while others propose that their assertoric function is derivable from their semantic denotation combined with a particular view of dynamic pragmatics (e.g. Farkas & Roelofsen 2017; Portner 2018; a.o.)
Produce a root declarative with the rising intonation typically used in a polar question in English, and it seems to be used to ask a question, albeit one with a special pragmatic requirement that there be some contextual bias in favor of the proposition denoted by the clause
Summary
Rising declaratives provide a useful test case for theories of the semanticspragmatics interface that aim to explain why the main clause types, when they are the root clause, are canonically linked to certain discourse functions. Various researchers have claimed that assertive rising declaratives have a unique contour of their own, and develop semantic/pragmatic accounts that depend on them having a unique intonation (e.g., Hirschberg & Ward 1995, Truckenbrodt 2012, Westera 2017, 2018, Jeong 2018, and Rudin 2018) They predict that productions of assertive RDs should stand apart intonationally from inquisitive RDs, which is not what we find. Farkas & Roelofsen (2017) analyze rising intonation as a semantic operator that produces a polar question interpretation from a declarative clause Combined with their proposed utterance function, the speaker only commits to the truth of the tautology that one of the answers p or not-p in the polar question denotation is true. Consider the following four utterances by the speaker S and their contexts. (23) and (25) appeared in section 3 as (13) and (12) respectively, and are paired here with a falling declarative (22) and a polar interrogative (24)
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