Gunlogson (2007) claims that (i) declaratives used as questions express a propositional commitment just as normal assertions do, but that (ii) this commitment is not attributed to the speaker’s but to the addressee’s commitment-set. Thus, Gunlogson (2007) interprets all declarative questions as “attributive” utterance types involving a commitment-shift from speaker to addressee. By contrast, I will argue that not all declarative questions involve the suggested commitment-shift. I will distinguish two types of declarative questions, (i) echo questions (with declarative sentence type) and (ii) confirmative questions. Whereas echo questions leave the speaker’s commitment-set untouched, confirmative questions involve speaker-commitment. Moreover, echo questions and confirmative questions behave very differently with respect to intonation patterns (rising versus falling), the type of sentence they instantiate and certain meta-linguistic operations.
We offer experimental data from Colloquial German that involve imperative morphology in speech reports and in the scope of wh-elements. We confirm two independent restrictions on these phenomena, whose statistical significance provides evidence for the existence of embedded imperatives in Colloquial German in general.*
Schlenker (2010) recently provided data from English and French suggesting that,contrary to standard assumptions (McCawley, 1982; Potts, 2005; Arnold, 2007; AnderBoiset al., 2011), non-restrictive relative clauses (NRCs) can take narrow scope under operators ofthe sentence within which they are embedded. This paper presents three experiments in Germanconfirming this claim. The results show that embedded readings are available with NRCs inGerman and give first insights into the puzzle under which conditions these embedded readingsdo or do not show up.Keywords: relative clauses, appositives, projection, rhetorical relations.
Schlenker (2013) gives a number of puzzling counterexamples to the widely accepted claim that non-restrictive relative clauses (NRCs) are always interpreted with respect to the global context, and never in the scope of entailment-canceling operators such as if. Local readings are available for NRCs attached to their host clause by a coordinating coherence relation. This paper develops a theoretical explanation of this pattern. We argue that NRCs are interpreted locally only if they are attached locally to their host clause both in syntax and in discourse structure. Subordinating coherence relations like Elaboration and Explanation resist discourse attachment in the scope of if because they tend to go together with relations that can only hold between speech acts. Like other subordinate clauses, NRCs tend to express subordinating coherence relations, which ultimately explains their pervasive tendency for global interpretation. In other words, this study shows how a theory of discourse coherence can help solve a problem in sentence semantics.
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