Abstract
This paper proposes an analysis of declaratives with the German discourse particles doch and ja as context change potentials (CCPs), imposing restrictions on input and output contexts consisting of public beliefs of the discourse participants. The analysis accounts for a wider range of data than previous approaches and makes novel predictions on the distribution of doch and ja by defining public beliefs as independent of fist-order beliefs, and modeling the difference between ja and doch in terms of whether a public belief of the addressee is presupposed (ja), or not (doch).
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Notes
- 1.
Possible expansion to other illocutionary forces is briefly discussed in Sect. 5.
- 2.
I write \(\varphi \) for the “prejacent” (the proposition of the particle utterance), \(\psi \) for the “antecedent” (the proposition of the antecedent utterance).
- 3.
For space, I do not mention uses where there is propositional contrast between \(\varphi \) and \(\psi \), but both hold, which can be understood as cases of blocked defeasible inference. As they allow ja-declaratives, I consider them a sub-category of acceptances.
- 4.
As a sentential adverb/discourse connective, the additive particle auch indicates that the prejacent is (additional) justification for believing some proposition asserted, similar to English “after all”.
- 5.
Typical continuations include questions, in (3) for example “Tell me, how many languages are there?”, to which the addressee is likely to know the answer if the prejacent holds, and elaborations on the prejacent on part of the speaker.
- 6.
This label is borrowed from Karagjosova (2004), who however includes reminders in case the speaker has no reason to assume that the prejacent is an inactive belief.
- 7.
Zimmermann includes the truth of the prejacent in the paraphrases which I leave out as it is not relevant for the expressive meaning component I am concerned with.
- 8.
Other than perceived similarities, the fact that their contributions become indistinguishable when they co-occur in the same utterance supports such a connection.
- 9.
This wording is possibly biased, but reflects the widely accepted observation that doch and ja do not alter the truth conditions of utterances, but add felicity conditions which depend on the utterance’s propositional content.
- 10.
She does not, however, take this relation to be part of doch’s meaning, but makes use of it to explain the interpretation of rejections with doch.
- 11.
This is logically equivalent to \(\varphi \rightarrow \lnot \psi \) and thus a variant of contextual contrast.
- 12.
Egg takes both the defeasible entailment relation and the salient element to be defeasibly deducible from the context set.
- 13.
Grice and Baumann give two examples for its use which they paraphrase “self-evident statement”, and “involved or sarcastic statement”[5, 295, translation my own], which I assume represents typical uses of the contour rather than its meaning.
- 14.
Explicit beliefs are the core of an agents set of beliefs in Wassermann’s model in the sense that they form the basis for reasoning.
- 15.
- 16.
I will remain neutral in regard to the necessity of valuation of public beliefs against worlds and thus in regard to both the question of whether a Stalnakerian analysis of the common ground is preferable for what doch and ja operate on.
- 17.
The symbols have been modified from the original; Gunlogson refers to speaker and addressee as the two discourse participants. Furthermore, she uses the propositions representing these beliefs to construct discourse commitments, which will not be necessary for the present purposes as no validation of propositions takes place.
- 18.
This assumption may not be uncontroversial, parallel to positive introspection for knowledge, but I do not see any obstacle to make this simplification for the present analysis.
- 19.
I use the propositional symbol \(\varphi \) here for simplicity, but the same goes for belief states.
- 20.
This is possibly too weak an assumption for modeling the effect of assertions on contexts, see Sect. 4.4 for discussion.
- 21.
“If [Peter] has been sick for a while (= \(\varphi \)), then (normally) he looks bad. (= \(\psi \))”.
- 22.
How use-conditional content or presuppositions can be compared parallel to logical strength of truth conditional content is beyond the scope of this paper, but see the comparison of presuppositions in Sect. 4.1 above.
- 23.
While this assumption glosses over a number of possible complications in an analysis of tag questions, the details are orthogonal to the question tag’s making the notion of “confirming nuance” more concrete and testable against intuitions.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Magda and Stefan Kaufmann for thorough discussion of and helpful comments on an earlier version, the audience at LENLS for comments, and Daisuke Bekki and Eric McCready for encouraging me to participate.
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Rieser, L. (2017). Discourse Particles as CCP-modifiers: German doch and ja as Context Filters. In: Otake, M., Kurahashi, S., Ota, Y., Satoh, K., Bekki, D. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10091. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50953-2_8
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