Impersonal pronouns are pervasive in the world's languages; boundaries between personal and impersonal paradigms are porous. Thus, in many languages, 2 nd -person pronouns can be impersonal (i), and vary under the influence of quantificational adverbs like always and rarely.(i) In those days, you always/usually/rarely lived to be 60.Additionally, dedicated impersonal pronouns may have a special association with the speaker, as argued for English one (Safir 2004;Moltmann 2006Moltmann , 2010 and German man (Kratzer 1997) (ii).(ii) a. One can see this picture from the entrance.(from Moltmann 2006) b. Es war klar, dass man sich nie mehr wiedersehen würde.It was clear that man REFL never again see.again would 'It was clear that we will never see each other again.' (from Kratzer 1997) This paper presents a comparative investigation of the interpretation of impersonal pronouns in English and German, each of which shows signs of both indexicality and impersonal, variable interpretation. The analysis places these pronouns within the pronominal paradigms of English and German, presenting a novel combination of independently-motivated type-shifting mechanisms (Pustejovsky 1995) and an expansion of the general theory of pronominal features (Kratzer 2009). I argue that distinct elements in the semantics of the items are responsible for the varying impersonal and the indexical behaviours. This is a step towards understanding the processes that take pronouns from the personal to the impersonal category, or back.

We discuss three English markers that modify the force of declarative utterances: reversepolarity tags (Tom's here, isn't he?), samepolarity tags (Tom's here, is he?), and rising intonation (Tom's here?). The differences among them are brought out in dialogues with taste predicates (tasty, attractive) and vague scalar predicates applied to borderline cases (red for an orange-red object), with consequences for the correct model of conversation, common ground, and speech acts. Our proposal involves a conversational "scoreboard" that allows speakers to make strong or tentative commitments, propose changes or raise expectations about the Common Ground, strongly or tentatively propose issues to be resolved, and hazard guesses about other participants' beliefs. This model allows for distinctions among speech acts that are subtle and fine-grained enough to account for the behavior of these three markers.

This paper has two mutually motivating goals. The empirical goal is to demonstrate that definite plurals are expressions whose interpretation requires an approach that incorporates the goals of the speaker and hearer. The theoretical goal is to contribute to the development of a mathematical model of the pragmatic reasoning involved in the interpretation of underspecified utterances. I propose a decision-theoretic approach in which alternative interpretations of underspecified expressions are built up compositionally, and the resulting interpretation is the disjunction of maximally optimal alternatives. For definite plurals, this derives the correct interpretations in a variety of linguistic and situational contexts based on pragmatic and lexical cues.

Mandarin utterance-final particle ba in the conversational scoreboard

The present paper contributes to the study of speech act pragmatics, language contact, bilingualism, and heritage languages by bringing attention to the pragmatics of a contact language, heritage Russian (HR). The current study has a descriptive orientation, its main goal being to create a baseline for the pragmatic competence of speakers with incomplete acquisition of L1, which characterizes language contact in immigrant populations. We focus on communicative strategies and the choice of linguistic forms in requests made by heritage speakers of Russian, native speakers of full Russian, and native speakers of American English. The specific research questions explored in this study are: Is the linguistic variablethe form of polite requests -correlated with the population (speakers of HR vs. speakers of full Russian)? How do the differences play out? Do HR speakers have their own communicative norms? If yes, did these new norms develop under the influence of English or as a result of language-internal restructuring? We report that HR exhibits evidence of developing its own conventions for expressing polite requests which differ from the corresponding conventions in full Russian. Specifically, HR speakers use significantly more impersonal modals than monolingual native speakers of Russian in informal scenarios and rely on increased syntactic complexity to mark polite requests in formal scenarios. In indirect requests produced in both types of scenarios, HR speakers overuse the downgrader požalujsta 'please' and underemploy the negative particle ne. These emergent communicative norms in HR seem to be partially influenced by English, but may also involve language-internal change.