Linguistics and English Language

Meaning and grammar seminar

Speaker: Deniz Rudin (University of Southern California)

Title: Conventional vs. Pragmatic Weakness in the Illocutionary Typology of Imperatives

Abstract: Imperative clauses can be used to do many things: give orders (Drop and give me twenty!), make offers (Have a cookie!), grant requests (Fine, go play outside!), make well-wishes (Have a nice flight!) and so on (e.g. Schmerling 1982, Condoravdi & Lauer 2011). There is a great deal of disagreement about what the semantics of imperatives is, and how utterances of imperatives conventionally update the context—do imperatives have propositional content (Kaufmann 2012, Condoravdi & Lauer 2017) or not (Portner 2004, Barker 2012, Charlow 2014)? Do they update the context by the same mechanism as declarative sentences (Kaufmann 2012, Condoravdi & Lauer 2017) or not (Portner 2004, Starr 2020)? Is variation in the illocutionary force of imperatives tantamount to variation in modal flavor (Kaufmann 2012, Portner 2007), or does it come from pragmatic inferences or contextual enrichments (Condoravdi & Lauer 2017, Starr 2020)?

In this talk, I argue that considering ways in which imperative illocution is systematically affected by intonational tunes can help us think more productively about these theoretical choice points. Through a case study of English imperatives accompanied by rising intonation (Portner 2012, Rudin 2018a,b), I argue that we can distinguish between imperatives that are conventionally weak and imperatives that are pragmatically weak. I provide an analysis of the interaction between imperatives and intonation, building on prior work on rising declaratives (Gunlogson 2001, 2008, Truckenbrodt 2006, Nilsenova 2006, Malamud & Stephenson 2015, Farkas & Roelofsen 2017, Westera 2017, Jeong 2018, Rudin 2018), which decomposes imperative discourse updates into commitment and QUD-addressing along lines similar to various proposals for declarative discourse updates (Hamblin 1971, Roberts 1996, Ginzburg 1996, Gunlogson 2001, Farkas & Bruce 2010). I propose that conventionally weak imperatives are weak due to lack of speaker commitment, analogously to rising declaratives, meaning we need an account of imperative discourse updates that includes speaker commitment (contra AnderBois 2018) but is not reducible to speaker commitment (contra Condoravdi & Lauer 2017).

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Nov 03 2020 -

Meaning and grammar seminar

2020-11-03: Conventional vs. Pragmatic Weakness in the Illocutionary Typology of Imperatives

Online via link invitation