Abstract
We develop a dynamic account of what if questions on which they re-pose questions inside local contexts introduced by their if -clauses subject to the felicity constraint that the resulting context is inquisitive. While this analysis is directly motivated by cases where a what if questioner challenges another speaker’s attempt to answer a current question under discussion (QUD) by seeming to re-ask this question over a more restricted contextual domain, it can also explain the flexibility of what if since other uses trigger accommodation with new QUDs to ensure that the post-suppositional inquisitivity condition is met. While QUD accommodation is a complex phenomenon that isn’t specific to just what if constructions, the pragmatic flexibility of what if furnishes a nice range of examples for investigating such repair. In the latter part of the paper, we focus on practical what if questions which trigger accommodation with QUDs that subserve the real-world domain goals of the speakers. We offer a systematic working theory of this accommodation within a formal model of discourse that involves goal stacks populated with both questions and decision problems tethered together by relevance. The larger contribution of this paper is to add to the understanding of how discourse felicity and update conditions at the level of speech acts can be encoded in natural languages. EARLY ACCESS
Highlights
Research at the semantics-pragmatics interface has progressed greatly in recent years by developing formal accounts of the discourse effect of different speech acts as well as the diverse variety of discourse particles (Farkas & Bruce 2010, Kramer & Rawlins 2009, 2010, Zimmermann 2011, Krifka 2013, Roelofsen & Farkas 2015, Goodhue & Wagner 2018; among others) and other left-peripheral morphology found across languages
This post-suppositional inquisitivity requirement is key to explaining the full range of interpretations, as we argue that many what if s trigger accommodation with new question under discussion (QUD) to ensure that the context reaches an inquisitive state, and this repair mechanism is in many cases constrained by the domain goals of the speakers
We have analyzed what if s as conditional/suppositional questions: they have the suppositional semantics of regular conditionals combined with a postupdate requirement for an inquisitive context, found with questions in general
Summary
Research at the semantics-pragmatics interface has progressed greatly in recent years by developing formal accounts of the discourse effect of different speech acts Our rough proposal is that what if questions serve to re-pose QUDs inside the local subordinate contexts introduced by their if -clauses (where the speakers are assuming these if clauses hold) subject to the felicity condition that the resulting context is inquisitive (Groenendijk 1999, Rawlins 2010) This post-suppositional inquisitivity requirement is key to explaining the full range of interpretations, as we argue that many what if s trigger accommodation with new QUDs to ensure that the context reaches an inquisitive state, and this repair mechanism is in many cases constrained by the domain goals of the speakers. While in this paper we have space and time to deal with only one case of discourse conditionals, the pieces of the proposal for what if s provide a starting point for analyzing the whole family, and, more generally, contribute to our understanding of what kinds of discourse constraints at the semantics-pragmatics interface can be encoded into natural language morphology
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