Abstract
This paper discusses three potential varieties of update: updates to the common ground, structuring updates, and updates that introduce discourse referents. These different types of update are used to model different aspects of natural language phenomena. Not-at-issue information directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary mood of a sentence structures the context. Other updates introduce discourse referents of various types, including propositional discourse referents for at-issue information. Distinguishing these types of update allows a unified treatment of a broad range of phenomena, including the grammatical evidentials found in Cheyenne (Algonquian) as well as English evidential parentheticals, appositives, and mood marking. An update semantics that can formalize all of these varieties of update is given, integrating the different kinds of semantic contributions into a single representation of meaning. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.7.2 BibTeX info
Highlights
Several natural language expressions seem to require an analysis that distinguishes semantic contributions further than what is asserted, what isSarah E
Distinguishing the three varieties of update discussed in the previous section allows for an analysis of parentheticals and appositives, phenomena related to evidentials and mood, and difficult to analyze without these distinctions
Synthesizing several ideas from the current semantics literature, this paper has argued that distinguishing three varieties of update — direct updates, structuring updates, and updates that introduce discourse referents — has wide empirical coverage
Summary
Several natural language expressions seem to require an analysis that distinguishes semantic contributions further than what is asserted, what is. A sentence makes at least three new semantic contributions: introducing a discourse referent for the at-issue proposition, directly adding not-at-issue information, if there is any, to the common ground, and imposing structure on the context. While we want to say that (9) proposes to add the at-issue proposition (that Floyd won) to the common ground, the default contribution of declarative mood, this analysis would not be appropriate for (8). Under the proposed analysis of mood, hedges can be analyzed as altering the propositional argument of the structuring update, keeping the contribution of declarative mood constant This type of analysis allows fine-grained distinctions in the illocutionary relation of a sentence, which constrains the utterance’s illocutionary force.
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