An empirical study on the semantics-pragmatics of two Romance confirmational tags
Abstract
This paper provides a fine-grained characterization of two confirmational tags in Catalan, oi? and eh?, starting with the novel claim that, despite appearances, they do not have the same distribution or meaning. While oi? is a rather unconstrained confirmational, eh? is proved to be sensitive to whether the main predicate of the sentence anchor p is objective or subjective. We ultimately propose that confirmational questions with oi? make a request for confirmation of the truth of the sentence anchor, whereas a confirmational with eh? is a request for the commitment of the addressee to the truth of the sentence anchor. Two consequences emerge from our analysis: oi? should be preferred when factual truths instead of opinions are conveyed, while eh? should be preferred in contexts where the speaker is not necessarily interested in finding out the truth of p. These predictions are tested in three experimental studies, which provide empirical support for the theoretical proposal regarding the different pragmatic contribution of both tags.
Keywords
question tags, confirmational tags, biased questions, Catalan, experimental pragmaticsReferences
Barker, Chris. 2002. The dynamics of vagueness. Linguistics and Philosophy 25: 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014346114955
Bates, Douglas, Mächler, Martin, Bolker, Ben, & Steve Walker. 2015. Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1): 1-48. https://doi.org/doi:10.18637/jss.v067.i01
Brown, Penelope, & Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bylinina, Lisa. 2013. The Grammar of Standards: Judge-dependence, Purpose-relativity, and Comparison Classes in Degree Constructions. Ph.D. thesis, LOT.
Bylinina, Lisa. 2016. Judge-Dependence in Degree Constructions. Journal of Semantics 34(2): 291–331. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffw011
Castroviejo, Elena. 2018. One interrogative tag, two different requests. Talk at 'Meaning in non-canonical Questions', Universität Konstanz.
Cattell, Ray. 1973. Negative transportation and tag questions. Language 49(3): 612–639. https://doi.org/10.2307/412354
Columbus, Georgie. 2010. A comparative analysis of invariant tags in three varieties of English. English World-Wide 31(3): 288–310. https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.31.3.03col
Cuenca, Maria Josep. 1997. Form-use mappings for tag questions. In K. Koerner (ed), Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of linguistic Science Series, 3–20. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cuenca, Maria Josep, & Josep M. Castellà. 1995. Una caracterització cognitiva de les preguntes confirmatòries («question tags»). Caplletra. Revista Internacional de Filologia 18: 65–84.
Domaneschi, Filippo, Romero, Maribel, & Bettina Braun. 2017. Bias in polar questions: Evidence from English and German production experiments. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 2(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.27
Farkas, Donka F., & Kim B. Bruce. 2010. On Reacting to Assertions and Polar Questions. Journal of Semantics 27(1): 81–118. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffp010
Farkas, Donka F., & Floris Roelofsen. 2017. Division of Labor in the Interpretation of Declaratives and Interrogatives. Journal of Semantics 34(2): 237-289. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffw012
Geurts, Bart. 2019. Communication as commitment sharing: Speech acts, implicatures, common ground. Theoretical Linguistics 45(1–2): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2019-0001
Geurts, Bart. 2023. Common ground in pragmatics. Ms., Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bart-Geurts/publication/375792392_Common_ground_in_pragmatics/links/655cb249b86a1d521bfcde99/Common-ground-in-pragmatics.pdf).
Gómez González, María de los Ángeles, & Nicole Dehé. 2020. The pragmatics and prosody of variable tag questions in English: Uncovering function-to-form correlations. Journal of Pragmatics 158: 33–52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.12.006
Groenendijk, Jeroen, & Martin Stokhof. 1984. Studies on the Semantics of Questions and the Pragmatics of Answers. Ph.D. thesis, University of Amsterdam.
Gunlogson, Christine. 2003. True to Form: Rising and Falling Declaratives as Questions in English. New York: Garland.
Gunlogson, Christine. 2008. A question of commitment. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 22: 101–136. https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.22.06gun
Gunlogson, Christine, & Daniel Büring. 2001. Aren’t positive and negative polar questions the same? Ms. UCLA.
Heim, Johannes, Keupdjio, Hermann, Lam, Zoe Wai-Man, Osa-Gómez, Adriana, Thoma, Sonja, & Martina Wiltschko. 2016. Intonation and Particles as Speech Act Modifiers: A Syntactic Analysis. Studies in Chinese Linguistics, 37(2): 109–129. https://doi.org/10.1515/scl-2016-0005
Heim, Johannes. 2019. Turn-peripheral management of Common Ground: A study of Swabian gell. Journal of Pragmatics 141: 130–146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2018.12.007
Heim, Johannes, & Martina Wiltschko. 2020. Deconstructing Questions: Reanalyzing a heterogenous class of speech acts via commitment and engagement. Scandinavian Studies in Language 11(1): 56–82. https://doi.org/10.7146/sss.v11i1.121361
Hernanz, Maria Lluïsa, & Gemma Rigau. 2006. Variación dialectal y periferia izquierda. In B. Fernández (ed), Andolin gogoan. Essays in honour of Professor Eguzkitza (pp. 435–452). Bilbao: UPV/EHU.
Karttunen, Lauri. 1977. Syntax and semantics of questions. Linguistics and Philosophy 1: 3–44. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00351935
Kimps, Ditte. 2018. Tag Questions in Conversation. A typology of their interactional and stance meanings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://www.torrossa.com/en/resources/an/5016711
Krifka, Manfred. 2015. Bias in Commitment Space Semantics: Declarative questions, negated questions, and question tags. Proceedings of SALT 25, 328–345. https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v25i0.3078
Krifka, Manfred. 2019. Commitments and beyond. Theoretical Linguistics 45(1–2): 73–91. https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2019-0006
Ladd, D. Robert. 1981. A first look at the semantics and pragmatics of negative questions and tag questions. Proceedings of Chicago Linguistic Society 17: 164–171.
Malamud, Sofia, & Tamina Stephenson. 2015. Three Ways to Avoid Commitments: Declarative Force Modifiers in the Conversational Scoreboard. Journal of Semantics 32(2): 275–311. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffu002
Marsili, Neri. 2024. The definition of assertion: Commitment and truth. Mind & Language 39(4): 540-560. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12476
McCready, Elin. 2007. Context shifting in questions and elsewhere. In L. McNally & E. Puig-Waldmüller (eds), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 11: 433-447.
Ninan, Dilip. 2014. Taste predicates and the acquaintance inference. Proceedings of SALT 24: 290–309. https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v24i0.2413
Ninan, Dilip. 2021. The Projection Problem for Predicates of Taste. Proceedings of SALT 30: 753–778. https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v30i0.4809
Peirce, Charles S. 1974. Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Poschmann, Claudia. 2008. All declarative questions are attributive? Belgian Journal of Linguistics 22: 247-269.
Prieto, Pilar, & Gemma Rigau. 2007. The Syntax-Prosody Interface: Catalan interrogative sentences headed by que. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics 6(2): 29–59. https://doi.org/10.5334/jpl.139
R Core Team. (2013). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. [Computer software]. R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
Reese, Brian, & Nicholas Asher. 2010. Biased questions, intonation and discourse. Information Structure: Theoretical, Typological, and Experimental Perspectives, 139–173.
Rigau, Gemma. 1998. La variació sintàctica: Uniformitat en la diversitat. Caplletra. Revista Internacional de Filologia 25: 63–82.
Romero, Maribel, & Chung-Hye Han. 2004. On Negative Yes/No Questions. Linguistics and Philosophy 27(5): 609–658. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:LING.0000033850.15705.94
Sudo, Yasutada. 2013. Biased Polar Questions in English and Japanese. In D. Gutzmann & H.-M. Gärtner (eds), Beyond Expressives: Explorations in Use-Conditional Meaning. Leiden: Brill.
Wiltschko, Martina. 2014. The universal structure of categories: Towards a formal Typology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wiltschko, Martina. 2021. The grammar of interactional language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wiltschko, Martina, & Johannes Heim. 2016. The syntax of confirmationals: A neo-performative analysis. In G. Kaltenböck, E. Keizer, & A. Lohmann (eds), Studies in Language Companion Series, 305–340. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.178.11wil
Wiltschko, Martina, & Johannes Heim. 2020. Grounding Beliefs: Structured Variation in Canadian Discourse Particles. In B. Achiri-Taboh (ed), Exoticism in English tag questions: Strengthening arguments and caressing the social wheel (pp. 1–44). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. https://static-gcs.edit.site/users-files/3a40ce0640c4685ed9b14165bc30b95e/the-exotic-tag-book-project-grounding_beliefs_author-extag7.pdf?dl=1
Zehr, Jeremy, & Florian Schwarz. 2018. PennController for Internet Based Experiments (IBEX) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/MD832
Published
Downloads
Copyright (c) 2024 Elena Castroviejo, Laia Mayol
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
