Question Under Discussion Research Articles

Quantity implicature interpretations in bilingual population: the case of Imbabura Kichwa.

Most studies on the pragmatic interpretation of existential quantifiers have been conducted in major Indo-European languages like English, Spanish, French, and Greek, focusing mainly on monolingual participants. However, in indigenous linguistic research, especially experimental research, it is crucial to consider several linguistic and extra-linguistic factors for successful implementation. Our research centered on the experimental investigation of the pragmatic interpretation of the quantifier wakin, meaning some in Kichwa, with Kichwa-Spanish bilingual adults from the province of Imbabura Ecuador. We employed the Truth Value Judgement Task (TVJT) for our experiments and incorporated the explicit Question Under Discussion (QUD) paradigm to facilitate pragmatic interpretations among our participants. Our initial experiment revealed a 78% acceptance level for the pragmatic interpretation of "some, but not all" in Kichwa, significantly lower than the 95% acceptance range observed in other languages. We hypothesized that access to technology and formal education might influence these results, leading us to simplify our experiment by eliminating the technological components of the research. In our subsequent experiment, adult speakers of Imbabura Kichwa achieved a 97% accuracy level, comparable to speakers of other languages. To benchmark our results against speakers of other languages under similar conditions, we evaluated whether Spanish speakers from two varieties in Ecuador (Quito and Guayaquil) could generate the "some, but not all" scalar implicature with the Spanish quantifier algunos. Our findings indicated that speakers achieved 95.5 and 97.4% accuracy for both varieties, respectively. Therefore, this study infers that under optimal conditions, speakers of indigenous languages in rural communities demonstrate commendable performance in experimental linguistic studies. Nonetheless, it underscores the necessity for meticulous planning and distinct handling in experimental studies involving speakers of these languages residing in rural areas without access to technological elements. We propose that such research broadens our comprehension of language utilization in minority communities and positively influences language restoration efforts by expanding experimental linguistics studies to indigenous languages.

Integrating relational and intentional theories of discourse coherence

This paper explores the ways in which insights from the two influential formal pragmatic theories of discourse coherence, namely, Question Under Discussion (QUD) and Rhetorical Relation (RR) models, can be integrated to build a more inclusive theory of discourse coherence. It proposes a simple and concrete procedure to derive the hierarchical structure of discourse from the subquestion relations between implicit QUDs reconstructed using informational structural principles (Riester, 2019; Reyle & Riester, 2016) and contextual entailment relations (Roberts, 2012). It applies the procedure to discourse examples involving various RRs to determine subordinating and coordinating relations and to create a parsimonious feature-based inventory of RRs with formal definitions. The resulting theory shows that establishing the QUD-RR correspondence is possible, contrary to what has been claimed (Hunter & Abrusán, 2017; Onea, 2019; Riester, 2019).

Verum, focus and evidentiality in Conchucos Quechua

Abstract For most Quechuan languages, the discourse enclitic =mi has been described as a (contrastive) focus marker and/or as a marker of direct evidentiality. In this paper, I argue that these claims do not seem to apply to Conchucos Quechua (Ancash, Peru). To challenge the association between =mi and focus, I offer a quantitative analysis that strongly suggests that this connection is not categorical in nature. To contest the association between =mi and direct evidentiality, I offer a qualitative analysis based on a question-under-discussion (QUD) model of discourse structure, using naturalistic data. I will argue that this enclitic is better characterised as an assertion operator, whose function is to bring closure to the current QUD (be it explicit or implicit). In this sense, the use of =mi is reminiscent of what has been called verum in the literature, and I thus explore how this characterisation fits within this discussion.

A defense of QUD reasons contextualism

ABSTRACT In this article, we defend the semantic theory, Question Under Discussion (QUD) Contextualism about Reasons that we develop in our monograph Semantics for Reasons against a series of objections that focus on whether our semantics can deliver predictions for some common examples, how we defend the semantic theory, and how we assess it compared to its competitors.

The at-issue status of ideophones in German: An experimental approach

Formal linguistics generally assumes that form-meaning relations in spoken language are arbitrary and not iconic. Ideophones, such as the English splish-splash have been considered exceptions to this rule of arbitrariness. Recently, however, researchers have begun to examine iconicity in spoken language more closely. Following work which established the default not- at-issue status of iconic co-speech gestures, here we discuss the crosslinguistic evidence for the (not-)at-issueness of ideophones and the factors that may have an influence upon this. We also present what we believe to be the first experimental work on the at-issue status of ideophones, conducted with German speakers. Although German may not be a prototypical ideophonic language, we argue that German ideophones follow crosslinguistic patterns in terms of at-issueness and provide initial evidence for the not-at-issue status of sentence- medial adverbial ideophones in German. This evidence comes from sentence-context matching tasks, where the mismatch effect was significantly larger for sentences containing standard adverbials than those containing sentence-medial adverbial ideophones. We presume that speaker judgements concerning how well target sentences match discourse contexts should be more impaired by mismatches induced by material relevant to the Question Under Discussion (QUD), i.e. at-issue material, than those induced by material irrelevant to the QUD, i.e. not-at- issue material. We thus argue that speakers’ ratings indicate that sentence-medial adverbial ideophones in German are not at-issue. This paper suggests a starting point for investigating the pragmatic status of ideophones crosslinguistically and also allows for comparison to previous research on other iconic enrichments, in particular gestures. This then has implications for our understanding of the at-issue status of iconic enrichments and how these enrichments interact with each other.

Alternatives in Counterfactuals: What IsRightand What IsNot

AbstractClassical semantics for counterfactuals is based on a notion of minimal change: If ${\textsf {A}}$, would ${\textsf {C}}$ says that the worlds that make ${\textsf {A}}$ true and that are otherwise minimally different from the actual world are ${\textsf {C}}$-worlds. This semantics suffers from a well-known difficulty with disjunctive antecedents (see e.g. Alonso-Ovalle, 2009; Willer, 2018; Santorio, 2018, a.o.). In a recent study, Ciardelli, Zhang, and Champollion (Ciardelli et al., 2018b; henceforth, CZC) present new, related difficulties for the classical approach having to do with unpredicted differences between counterfactuals with De Morgan-equivalent antecedents, and related pattern of inferences. They propose a new semantics for counterfactuals, which builds on inquisitive semantics (see Ciardelli et al., 2018a) and gives up on minimal change. Building on this debate, we report on a series of experiments that investigate the role of overt negation in this data. Our results replicate CZC’s main effects, but they also indicate that those effects are linked to the presence of overt negation. We propose a novel account, based on three key assumptions: (i) the semantics for counterfactuals does involve a notion of minimal change, after all; (ii) the meanings of disjunction and negation are associated with alternatives, which interact with the meaning of counterfactuals; (iii) the alternatives generated by negation are partially determined by the question under discussion (QUD). We compare our account with other existing accounts, including CZC’s own proposal, as well as Schulz (2019) and Bar-Lev & Fox (2020) ones.

Alternatives to QUD

Abstract The paper critically examines some central principles of the Question Under Discussion (QUD) framework and ultimately explores the concept of ‘question’, central to QUD-models. It demonstrates how fine-grained, interactionally informed analyses of language-specific categories can reveal building blocks of interaction and explain the sources of the observed information- and discourse-structuring interpretations (such as update, contrast and more). Employing data from Anal Naga (Trans-Himalayan, India), it proceeds to a fine-grained analysis of the notion of ‘question’. The decomposition of ‘questions’ into smaller building blocks similarly reveals how diverse categories and discourse processes can trigger the interpretation of an information request. These findings and additional theoretical arguments suggest that QUD-models are problematic for various reasons: such models are non-parsimonious as they add superfluous extra layers to explain the observations; the explanatory apparatus is circular, as the extra layers are derived from within the explananda but regarded as underlying explanatory factors; and the models gloss over the actual factors by channelling them into cover terms prematurely regarded as primitive. Finally, since ‘question’ does not constitute a primitive concept but is a product of diverse discourse processes, discourse cannot be modelled on this foundation.

QUD sensitivity in the computation of scalar implicatures in second language acquisition

ABSTRACT This study aims to investigate adult L2 speakers’ use of different types of information in the comprehension of pragmatic inferences by examining L1-Mandarin Chinese L2-English speakers’ sensitivity to cues all and any in scalar implicature (SI) computation for some. This article and our experimental setup does not seek to understand how the question under discussion (QUD) affects implicature derivation. Rather, we examine whether comprehension of scalar sentences is modulated by QUD. We used an acceptability judgment task in which the felicitousness of the target response containing some in a given picture is manipulated by the QUD containing all or any. The interpretation of some depends on the QUD. For instance, in the question “Are all/any of the squares red?,” all primes an implicature “Some but not all squares are red” reading, whereas any does not. Linear mixed-effects regression analysis conducted on z-score transformed Likert-scale ratings with QUD type (all/any) and Group (native vs. L2 speakers) showed that native speakers differentiated between any and all in their ratings for target sentences with some, but L2 speakers did not. That is, native speakers rated target infelicitous sentences with some in the QUD-any condition significantly higher than in the QUD-all condition. Though we stress that these results must be considered exploratory in nature, our findings are in line with the proposal that native and L2 speakers differ in the type of information they attend to during language comprehension.

The Information-Structural Status of Adjuncts: A Question-under-Discussion-Based Approach

In this paper we present an analysis of the information structural properties of different types of verb and sentence modifying adjuncts under a QUD (question under discussion) approach. Our study is based on naturalistic data from English, French and German containing adjuncts such as temporal, spatial, or manner prepositional phrases, as well as different types of adverbial clauses. The analysis relies on the approach by Riester et al. (2018), which identifies the (generally implicit, sometimes overt) QUD preceding each utterance of a text by means of pragmatic principles, and derives from it the information structure of the utterance. The analysis of adjuncts within this approach shows that in certain contexts, despite conveying new information, adjuncts do not answer the QUD that is answered by the sentence they syntactically depend on. We argue that these adjuncts answer a different QUD and behave as independent discourse units. As such, they have an information structure of their own and are in a rhetorical relation with their host clause. Our analysis sheds light on the similarities between adjuncts and Potts’ (2005) supplements. Both can be accounted for as independent discourse units; however, while supplements display projective behavior, adjuncts do not. Following Venhuizen et al. (2014), we ascribe this difference to their different semantic anchor (nominal vs. verbal). Our work therefore highlights a different way for an expression to be independent at a discourse level, other than being projective content.

Ignorance implicatures of modified numerals

Modified numerals, such as at least three and more than five, are known to sometimes give rise to ignorance inferences. However, there is disagreement in the literature regarding the nature of these inferences, their context dependence, and differences between at least and more than. We present a series of experiments which sheds new light on these issues. Our results show that (a) the ignorance inferences of at least are more robust than those of more than, (b) the presence and strength of the ignorance inferences triggered by both at least and more than depends on the question under discussion (QUD), and (c) whether ignorance inferences are detected in a given experimental setting depends partly on the task that participants are asked to perform (e.g., an acceptability task versus an inference task). We offer an Optimality Theoretic account of these findings. In particular, the task effect is captured by assuming that in performing an acceptability task, participants take the speaker’s perspective in order to determine whether an expression is optimal given a certain epistemic state, while in performing an inference task they take the addressee’s perspective in order to determine what the most likely epistemic state of the speaker is given a certain expression. To execute the latter task in a fully rational manner, participants have to perform higher-order reasoning about alternative expressions the speaker could have used. Under the assumption that participants do not always perform such higher-order reasoning but also often resort to so-called unidirectional optimization, the task effect finds a natural explanation. This also allows us to relate our finding to asymmetries between comprehension and production that have been found in language acquisition.

When factivity meets the conjoint/disjoint alternation

This paper examines the conjoint/disjoint alternation in matrix verbs which take clausal complements in Zulu. It shows that the typical verbs which by default take the disjoint form with a clausal complement are factive verbs, though it is also clear that other attitude verbs can also undergo the conjoint/disjoint alternation. The paper explores the connection between focus and the conjoint/disjoint alternation in Zulu under the Question Under Discussion (QUD) approach, to help understand the interpretations associated with the alternations in combination with clausal complements.

From maximality to bias: Biased A-not-A questions in Mandarin Chinese

This study aims to derive the epistemic bias in shi-bu-shi questions, a type of A-not-A question in Mandarin Chinese. I propose: (i) the focus marker shi presupposes that its prejacent is a possible complete answer to the current Question Under Discussion (QUD); (ii) accordingly, shi-bu-shi questions are presupposed to be part of the Focus-strategy of inquiry; (iii) the Focus-strategy of inquiry indicates the questioner's intention to close the current QUD as soon as possible, and to achieve this goal, the questioner should check the answer that she considers most likely to be true. By assuming such completeness-to-likelihood reasoning, a novel link between focus in polar questions and question bias is established. The ramifications of this proposal for related phenomena (e.g., bias in embedded questions, evidential bias) are then discussed.

Pragmatic inferences are QUD-sensitive: an experimental study

Implicatures serve as an important testing ground for examining the process of integrating semantic and pragmatic information. Starting with Bott & Noveck (2004), several studies have found that implicature computation is costly. More recently, attention has shifted toward identifying contextual cues that modulate this processing cost. Specifically, it has been hypothesized that calculation rate and processing cost are a function of whether the Question Under Discussion (QUD) supports generating the implicature (Degen 2013; Degen & Tanenhaus 2015). In this paper, we present a novel elicitation task establishing what the relevant QUDs are for a given context (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, a sentence-picture verification study, we extend earlier findings about the effect of QUDs on scalar inference to a different kind of pragmatic inference:it-cleft exhaustivity. For both inferences, we find that under QUDs that bias toward calculation, there is no increase in reaction times, but under QUDs that bias against calculating the inference we observe longer reaction times. These results are most compatible with a constraint-based account of implicature, where QUD is one of many cues. Additionally, we explore whether our findings can be informative in narrowing down precisely what aspect of the inferential process incurs a cost.

Epistemic stance without epistemic modals: the case of the presumptive future

This paper deals with the non-temporal use of the future in Italian knownas ‘epistemic’ or ‘presumptive’ (PF) in declaratives and interrogatives. We firstdistinguish PF from epistemic necessity and possibility, as well as from weaknecessity modals, providing in the process the main empirical challenges PF raises.We then propose and justify a semantic account that treats PF as a special normalitymodal that involves a subjective likelihood component. Since in our account theprejacent (the proposition in the scope of the modal) is at issue, the use of PF triggersthe implicature that the speaker is not in a position to appeal to what she knows inorder to support her commitment to the prejacent. This, we claim, is the source ofthe intuition that PF is often used to offer a “guess” relative to the question underdiscussion (QUD).

What ifs

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

Multiple accent in alternative questions

Alternative Questions (AltQs) are typically characterized by two prosodic cues: a final falling boundary tone and a pitch accent on each disjunct. Recent accounts in the literature have taken the final fall as the central surface cue for AltQ interpretation or have assigned a vacuous semantic contribution to the multiple accent on the disjuncts. Based on data from English and Turkish, we argue that both cues are equally important and require modelling in a unified account of AltQs. Combining ingredients from the literature (Roberts, 1996; Biezma, 2009; Westera, 2017), we propose that, essentially, the multiple accent shapes the Question under Discussion (QUD) and that the final fall, or the lack thereof, indicates restrictions on the content of the QUD via (un)satisfaction of Attention Maxims.

Echoicity and contrast in Spanish conditionals

Abstract This paper is concerned with a conditional construction in Spanish, which we call echoic contrastive conditional, ecc for short. In eccs, the consequent is entailed, the antecedent echoes the content of a previous assertion, and both antecedent and consequent are marked with a Contrastive Topic. Our goal is to fit these properties in a formal explanation compatible with a simple analysis of conditionals. We claim that eccs are a subtype of biscuit conditional, in that antecedent and consequent are independent (i.e. do not express a hypothetical relation). Additionally, we assume that pragmatic reasoning has to explain why a conditional is used to express an adversative relation between the two clauses. First, a proposition that has already been proposed to increase the Common Ground is placed in the antecedent of a conditional in which there is no hypothetical relation between p and q. Thus, the addressee needs to reason as to the pragmatic function the speaker wants to achieve. Second, the Contrastive Topic marking signals that both conjuncts are answers to a multiple wh-question, proposed by the speaker as the current Question Under Discussion (QUD). Third, the answer provided by the second conjunct is a stronger argument for the speaker’s communicative goal than the one provided by the first conjunct. The joint occurrence of echoicity, lack of dependence and Contrastive Topic marking leads to an adversative rhetorical relation between the conjuncts.

Context-Sensitivity and Individual Differences in the Derivation of Scalar Implicature.

The derivation of scalar implicatures for the quantifier some has been widely studied to investigate the computation of pragmatically enriched meanings. For example, the sentence “I found some books” carries the semantic interpretation that at least one book was found, but its interpretation is often enriched to include the implicature that not all the books were found. The implicature is argued to be more likely to arise when it is relevant for addressing a question under discussion (QUD) in the context, e.g., when “I found some books” is uttered in response to “Did you find all the books?” as opposed to “Did you find any books?”. However, most experimental studies have not examined the influence of context on some, instead testing some sentences in isolation. Moreover, no study to our knowledge has examined individual differences in the ability to utilize context in interpreting some, whereas individual variation in deriving implicatures for some sentences in isolation is widely attested, with alternative proposals attributing this variation to individual differences in cognitive resources (e.g., working memory) or personality-based pragmatic abilities (e.g., as assessed by the Autism-Spectrum Quotient). The current study examined how context influences the interpretation of some in a story-sentence matching task, where participants rated some statements (“I cut some steaks”) uttered by one character, in response to another character’s question (QUD) that established the implicature as relevant (“Did you cut all the steaks?”) or irrelevant (“Did you cut any steaks?”). We also examined to what extent individuals’ sensitivity to QUD is modulated by individual differences via a battery of measures assessing cognitive resources, personality-based pragmatic abilities, and language abilities (which have been argued to modulate comprehension in other domains). Our results demonstrate that QUD affects the interpretation of some, and reveal that individual differences in sensitivity to QUD are modulated by both cognitive resources and personality-based pragmatic abilities. While previous studies have argued alternatively for cognitive resources or personality-based pragmatic abilities as important for deriving implicatures for some in isolation, we argue that arriving at a context-sensitive interpretation for some depends on both cognitive and personality-based properties of the individual.

QUD effects on epistemic containment principle

The Epistemic Containment Principle (ECP) requires that epistemic modals takewider scope than strong quantifiers such as every or most (von Fintel and Iatridou, 2003). Althoughfairly robust in its realization, a few systemic classes of counterexamples to the ECPhave been noted. Based on these, previous work has argued for two claims: subjective modalsobey the ECP, whereas objective ones don’t (Tancredi, 2007; Anand and Hacquard, 2008); andevery respects the ECP, whereas each violates it (Tancredi, 2007). This paper argues that explicitQuestions Under Discussion (QUDs; Roberts, 1996; Ginzburg, 1996) also systematicallyinfluence the ECP: scopal orderings that provide relevant answers to the given QUDs are preferred,and this tendency can override the ECP. To support this claim, the paper presents anexperimental study. The results corroborate the existence of systematic QUD effects on theECP, and support the view that the ECP is derived from a confluence of various pragmatic andlexical biases.Keywords: Epistemic Containment Principle (ECP), epistemic modals, Question Under Discussion(QUD), quantifiers, scopal ambiguity, experimental semantics.

Context Effects in Discourse: The Question Under Discussion

ABSTRACTLinguistic analyses of the Question Under Discussion (QUD) provide an interesting extension to Tony Sanford’s work on discourse coherence (e.g., Sanford & Emmott, 2012). The QUD approach claims that discourse is organized by a series of overt and covert questions and answers to, or comments on, them. In a coherent discourse, material that addresses the current QUD receives focus, and its processing is facilitated. After a brief review of the existing literature showing that the QUD affects discourse processing, we describe several lines of our own published research on the QUD and briefly present two new experiments. We first review the effects of overt questions on sentence comprehension, arguing that sentences that are thematically and syntactically congruent with the bias of an overt preceding question are processed faster than ones that require a syntactic and thematic shift. We present new evidence suggesting that assertions that address the focused element of a preceding question are likely to receive an exhaustive interpretation. Turning to covert questions, we review evidence that modals and other indications of the uncertain possibility of some event introduce a QUD about the occurrence of that event, biasing and facilitating comprehension of sentences that address such a QUD. Finally, we present new evidence suggesting that although sentential assertions in a discourse are likely to be taken to address an implicit QUD introduced by the antecedent of a conditional, elliptical assertions still tend to find their antecedents in a phrase whose structure is readily available. Thus, although satisfying the requirements of the current QUD is one factor that affects discourse comprehension, it is actually just one of many.