A Formal Treatment of the Pragmatics of Questions and Attitudes*

Concealed Questions Under Cover

“…Of course, still, CQs are ordinarily interpreted as requiring identification by name, and cases like (55) are very marginal. A theory of how covers are contextually selected is urgently needed to account for these facts, but unfortunately such a theory must be left to another occasion (see Aloni 2005b, and Schwager 2007 for a first attempt).…”

Bodyguards under Cover: the Status of Individual Concepts

“…Therefore, I would like to go back to the original motivation of individual concepts as identifying the individuals one wants to talk about. A formal account of the idea that belief attribution, as well as questioning and quantification proceed with respect to mehods of identification, is provided in Aloni (2000). 13 Although, at an index, common nouns denote sets of individuals, we can identify them only under certain guises -that is, we need individual concepts to pick out individuals.…”

“…Nevertheless, it is far from trivial to predict what conceptual cover(s) is/are salient in a given situation. Aloni (2005) constitutes the most elaborate attempt to provide a stringent formal pragmatic account to determine which conceptual cover is actually used in a particular context. The approach is couched in bi-directional OT and makes quite good predictions.…”

Speaking of Qualities

“…The chosen identifier has to be 'vivid' (the argument is known as the shortest spy-problem). Aloni (2000Aloni ( , 2005 provides a bi-directional OT account for what identifiers are eligible depending on the tasks of the ongoing conversation. As this is largely orthogonal to our concerns here, I will just assume that her results are basically correct.…”