Abstract

English attitude reports like “ x thinks that p ” can be used in two different types of contexts: ones where the Question Under Discussion (QUD) concerns whether or not p is true and ones where the QUD concerns x ’s mental state itself. Yucatec Maya (YM) has two different morphosyntactic forms differing superficially in the presence or absence of the morpheme -e’ , which serves as a topic marker elsewhere in the language. This paper argues that despite these two forms being truth-conditionally equivalent, their use is consistently correlated with which sort of QUD is present in the context. To account for these facts, I develop a particular conception of the relationships between QUDs, relevance, at-issueness, and assertion, building on the account of Simons et al. (2011). Given this theory, I propose a semantics where -e’ encodes that the attitudinal predication is parenthetical — that is, not part of the at-issue proposal (similar to English sentences like “It’s raining, I think”) and instead contributes to what I dub the basis of the proposal. I show that this semantics, together with plausible general pragmatic reasoning, provides an account of the meaning of the two attitude constructions in YM and their distribution in discourse. BibTeX info

Highlights

  • In recent decades, a sizable literature has developed in which the assumption that conversational participants are addressing an abstract Question Under Discussion (QUD) (Roberts 2012, Ginzburg 1996, et seq.) is used to analyze a diverse array of linguistic phenomena

  • While I leave open the details of how these various factors cause slifting to not be a pragmatic competitor, I hope to have made the case that the observed difference in QUD-sensitivity of the Bare Clause report in Yucatec Maya (YM) and embedding reports in English can be understood in a principled way, even under the assumption that the semantics I propose for YM reports has direct parallels in English

  • Whereas ordinary embedded attitude reports in English can be used either in response to QUDs about the mental state itself or about the attitudinal object (as discussed by Simons (2007)), we have seen that Bare Clause and Topic + Clause reports in YM regularly distinguish these two uses, with Bare Clause reports felicitous in the former type of context, and Topic + Clause reports in the latter

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Summary

Introduction

A sizable literature has developed in which the assumption that conversational participants are addressing an abstract Question Under Discussion (QUD) (Roberts 2012, Ginzburg 1996, et seq.) is used to analyze a diverse array of linguistic phenomena. Semantics and pragmatics of (not-)at-issueness in Yucatec Maya attitude reports the two forms in (3), differing superficially only in the presence or absence of the topic clitic -e’ attached to the attitude verb.. I show that Topic + Clause forms like (3a) are preferred when the QUD is about the truth or falsity of the belief, namely whether uncooked chaya is poisonous.

Two kinds of attitude reports
Attitudinal constructions in YM
Truth-conditional equivalence
QUD sensitivity
Parallels with other topics
QUDs and at-issueness in YM attitude reports
An alternative conception of at-issueness
Asymmetric assertions and speaker commitment
Proposals in a dynamic semantics
Parenthetical attitudes as asymmetric assertions
Quality-based inferences with third-person Bare Clause reports
Findings
Conclusion

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