Exclamatives, degrees and speech acts

Rett, Jessica

doi:10.1007/s10988-011-9103-8

Cited by 136 publications

(97 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…This approach does not invoke the ranking of alternatives. Rett (2011) analyses exclamatives in terms of an illocutionary operator E-Force, which expresses that the propositional content was not expected by the speaker. As for wh-exclamatives, Rett shows that they always have a degree interpretation, and argues that they denote a property of degrees; for example, (ia) has the denotation in (ib) (Rett 2011: 40):…”

Section: T B(w) and O(w)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, there is no consensus as to whether mirativity must be treated as a separate category (Aikhenvald 2004, Torres Bustamante 2012 or as an overtone or extension of evidential markers (Lazard 1999, Rett & Murray 2013. The issue is particularly difficult to tackle in light of the wealth of different phenomena that manifest an unexpectedness import across languages: most notably exclamative clauses (see, a.o., Zanuttini & Portner 2003, Rett 2011, Peterson 2010, Giurgea 2014, exclamations (Rett 2011), European Portuguese "evaluative fronting" (Ambar 1999), (some uses of) GermanĀ-fronting (Frey 2010), unembedded dass-clauses in German (Grosz 2011), the mirative use of the imperfect in Spanish (Torres Bustamante 2012, and mirative evidentials (Rett & Murray 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures

Bianchi

Bocci

Cruschina

2016

S&P

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This paper discusses the fronting of a focal constituent to a clauseinitial position which, in various languages, is associated with an import of unexpectedness. We provide prosodic and syntactic evidence from Italian showing that this phenomenon has distinctive grammatical properties with respect to other instances of "focus fronting". We argue that the fronted constituent bears narrow focus, and that the unexpectedness import conveys that the asserted proposition is less likely than one or more distinct focus alternatives (see Grosz 2011). We characterize this import as a conventional implicature, and we argue that likelihood is interpreted with respect to an informative modal base which is shared by the conversational community (the context set). We show that the unexpectedness import expressed by a speaker can be accepted or rejected by the other discourse participants: thus, it qualifies as an evaluative commitment of the speaker and, when accepted by the interlocutors, it can give rise to a shared evaluation.

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Section: T B(w) and O(w)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures

Bianchi

Bocci

Cruschina

2016

S&P

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“…In what follows, however, we argue that our cases of emphatic fronting are not exclamatives in this sense, but rather sentence exclamations. Consider the following difference between sentence exclamations (44) and exclamatives (45 47) pointed out by Rett (2011: 414 According to Rett (2011) In accordance with Rett (2011), we see that (48), as a sentence exclamation, additionally asserts a proposition p, while (49), as an exclamative, does not make a contribution to the discourse that could be denied or affirmed directly. In sum, we conclude that our cases of emphatic fronting involving non-contrastable particles should not be analyzed along the lines of exclamatives such as Boy, does that hurt!…”

Section: Emphatic Frontings Are Not Exclamativesmentioning

confidence: 82%

“…Turning to compositional accounts of exclamations, we find an elaborate semantic proposal by Rett (2011) who argues for an operator 'E-FORCE', which, like other illocutionary force operators, is a function from propositions. This operator is claimed to be appropriate for both sentence exclamations and exclamatives (and the two different types of expectation violations scalar and non-scalar they involve, see Sect.…”

Section: The Derivation Of Emphatic Fronting In Germanmentioning

confidence: 91%

Particle topicalization and German clause structure

Trotzke

Quaglia

2016

J Comp German Linguistics

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In this paper, we provide a comprehensive account of the phenomenon of topicalizing verb particles in German. Based on the data we discuss, we argue that only a version of the Split-CP hypothesis for the German clause can account for the observations. Section 1 critiques previous accounts of particle topicalization and discusses some properties of particles that are potentially relevant to topicalization. We conclude that a particle's ability to be topicalized depends more on its ability to be contrasted with other particles than on the semantic autonomy of the particle per se. Section 2 discusses unexpected cases of non-contrastable particles in the left periphery. In this context, we introduce a previously unnoticed phenomenon in which particle verbs denoting strongly emotionally evaluated situations allow their particles to be topicalized, even if the particle does not receive a contrastive interpretation. In Sect. 3, we show that an elaborated syntax of the German left periphery of the kind argued for in cartographic approaches is uniquely able to predict the distribution of topicalized particles.

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“…They could be given a related analysis in terms of the same contextually determined implicit functions. However, it is currently controversial whether or not they involve degrees, and both degree and non-degree analyses have been offered (Zanuttini and Portner 2003;Rett 2011;Nouwen and Chernilovskaya 2013). 12 As B&B correct point out, for compositional reasons, -issimo in this sentence has to type-raise, as a determiner is of type et, et, t , rather than e, t .…”

Section: Ofwinning)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Varieties of intensification

Bylinina

Sudo²

2015

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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This paper is a commentary on Beltrama and Bochnak (2015), who propose a uniform semantics for different uses of cross-categorial intensifiers -issimo in Italian and šému in Washo as universal quantifiers over contexts. Two concerns of their uniform semantics are raised, (i) unexpected restrictions on intensification, and (ii) non-truth-conditional intensification. It is argued that a uniform semantics like Beltrama and Bochnak's is unachievable, and suggested that the multitude of uses commonly observed with intensifiers should be captured in terms of semantic similarity, rather than semantic identity.

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Exclamatives, degrees and speech acts

Cited by 136 publications

References 31 publications

Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures

Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures

Particle topicalization and German clause structure

Varieties of intensification

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