Discourse components

One way to think about the purpose of discourse is in terms of acquiring, negociating, and simply exchanging information. The goal of discourse can then be considered to consist in answering one very important question:How is the world? (cf. Roberts, 1996). If we model discourse in this way, it is important that we have a means for keeping track of which pieces of information have been established thus far.

A standard way to model the acquired information is through the notions ofcommon ground (c g) andcontext set(c s) (Stalnaker, 1973). The common ground is a set of propositions that all discourse participants accept as true of the world of their actual world: for example, a banalc g could containthat snow is white. Crucially, the information contained in the common ground

issharedby all discourse participants. The context set, in turn, is simply the intersection of the common ground (i.e. the set of all worlds that are viable options for being the actual world). For-mally, the goal of any discourse is to reduce the context setc s to a singleton set, i.e. the set that consists only of the actual world. As each proposition in the common ground encodes some in-formation about the actual world, adding more and more propositions to the common ground leads to stricter conditions on belonging to the context set, and hence, the restriction of the con-text.

In this dissertation, I adopt the modelisation of context structure proposed by Farkas and Bruce (2010), who rely on foundational work by Hamblin (1971), Stalnaker (1973, 1978) and Carl-son (1983), and incorporate features from earlier work by Ginzburg (1996), GunlogCarl-son (2001) and Asher and Lascarides (2003). Crucially, while the main idea remains the same – discourse is thought of as an incremental process of acquiring and negotiating information – Farkas and Bruce’ model includes not only a common ground and a context set, but also different types of components that allow for a more fine-grained classification of different types of information.

First, if the goal of discourse is to find out what the world is like, this question is only answered through answering smaller, easier-to-answer questions. These questions are called Questions Under Discussion (QUDs) (Roberts, 1996). By answering QUDs, discourse participants provide new information incrementally, getting closer and closer to the answer of the big question. In the model proposed by Farkas and Bruce (2010), QUDs are stored on theT a b l e. TheT a b l e has a push-down stack structure, and stores items that correspond to pairs of syntactic objects and their denotations. Besides QUDs, Farkas and Bruce propose that discourse participants may also use theT a b l e to propose additions to thec g, i.e. to make specific update proposals that then can be reacted upon by other discourse participants. In this model, the immediate goal of the conversation is to empty theT a b l e. This is done by answering the QUDs in the stack, and agreeing or disagreeing with the update proposals – or more generally, by settling the issues on the Table (cf. Roberts, 1996).

As we saw in section 2.1, there is a clear theoretical connection between questions on the one hand, andF-marking-containing assertions on the other. On a QUD-based approach, this correspondance makes it easy to model certain model-internal dependencies. For example, al-though the QUD might not be explicitly given in the context, theF-pattern of an assertion indi-cates which QUDs it can address. Within such a model, an assertion that targets the QUD that is on the top of theT a b l e, i.e. first in line to be solved, is calledat-issue(Simons et al., 2010), and corresponds intuitively to the ‘main point’ of the utterance. TheF-based fit between a QUD and an assertion allows discourse participants to identify the QUD that is being addressed, or to accommodate QUDs that are otherwise implicit (Beaver and Clark, 2008).¹⁸

As mentioned above, the common ground is assumed to only contain propositions on whose

18Inversely, semantic content that does not address the immediate QUD has been classified asnon-at-issue. This type of content, which is represented for example by appositive relative clauses (AnderBois et al., 2015), is sometimes argued to be directly added to the common ground, without passing through a propositional phase at theT a b l e.

2.2. Semantics-pragmatics

truth all discourse participants agree. However, the participants do not always agree. In Farkas and Bruce’s model, a separate component tracks the participants’ individual public discourse commitments:D C_X (whereXis a variable for discourse participant). The separation of the com-mon ground and the individual public discourse commitments allows the conversation to be in a state where discourse participantsAandB publicly express their disagreement on an issuep: in this case, neitherp nor¬p is inc g, but the participants’ public discourse commitment sets containpand¬p, respectively.

Finally, the model that Farkas and Bruce propose contains one more component that plays an important role in their analysis of canonical and uncanonical expressions of (dis)agreement with assertions, and canonical and uncanonical ways of addressing questions. This component, theprojected set (p s), tracks canonical future common grounds. These common grounds are supersets of the currentc g, and correspond to a canonical outputc g after the most pressing issue or QUD has been settled. For example, the canonical way to remove a proposal to update the c g with an assertive item is for the discourse participants to agree to add the proposition to the c g. As the authors put it, “an assertion projects confirmation in that it projects a future common ground that includes the asserted proposition" (p. 88). When theT a b l e-item is a question, the p s consists in a set of common grounds, each including a possible answer to the question.

In this dissertation, I will make extensive use of the componentsc g,T a b l e, andD C_x, and leavep saside. A schematic representation of Farkas and Bruce’s (2010) discourse model is shown in Figure 2.1.

T a b l e

QUDs, proposals

D C_A D C_B

c g

a set of propositions

c s

∩c g

p s

a set ofc gs

Figure 2.1: Discourse components in Farkas and Bruce 2010

As we have seen, all information stored in thec gis public, i.e. shared by all discourse participants.

However, a lot of information may also be stored privately. For instance, discourse participants have access to sets of propositions that describe what they might believe, know, and wish for;

while these propositions may not be public, or even true of the actual world, they are nevertheless

accessible to them.

Since Kratzer’s seminal work on modality (Kratzer, 1977, 1981, 1991), such sets of proposi-tions have been analysed using the notion ofconversational backgrounds. A conversational back-ground is a function from an evaluation world to a set of propositions. The use of different con-versational backgrounds results in different “flavours” of modality, a phenomenon that is easy to illustrate with examples containing modal auxiliaries. To begin, in (53), bothmayandmustare naturally interpreted as relating a permission and an obligation, respectively. The conversational background is deontic: it yields a set of propositions describing rules and/or duties in the evalu-ation world. In (53),mayis read as expressing deontic possibility, andmust, deontic necessity. To make the contribution of the deontic conversational background explicit, both examples could be preceded by the phraseIn view of what the rules in w are(Kratzer, 1977).

(53) Modal auxiliariesmayandmust: deontic flavour a. Casey may dance with Andy

b. Casey must dance with Andy

In (54), however, where only tense has been modified with respect to (53), we naturally interpret mayandmustas evoking epistemic possibility and necessity. In other words, instead of referring to what the rules or duties are inw, we refer to what is known inw. Here, the examples could be preceded by the phraseIn view of what is known in w.

(54) Modal auxiliariesmayandmust: epistemic flavour a. Casey may have danced with Andy

b. Casey must have danced with Andy

Thus, modal expressions are existential or universal quantifiers over sets of worlds. Under Kratzer’s analysis, the set of worlds they quantify over is in fact determined by two conversational back-grounds: amodal base(f), which is circumstantial or epistemic, and anordering source(g), which is stereotypical (referring to what isnormal), deontic (referring to what therules orlawsare), bouletic (referring to what iswanted), or teleological (referring togoals). The intersection of the output of a modal base (i.e. a set of possible worlds) consists of those worlds that are either cir-cumstantially or epistemically equivalent with the evaluation world (depending on which modal base is used). An ordering source is used to further restrict this set so that it corresponds to a set of worlds that is closest to anidealdetermined by the contents of the ordering source.

In other words, modals are interpreted through the use of a conversational background, but they do not quantify over all worlds that are in the intersection of the set of propositions that the conversational background outputs, but only those that are ideal according to some order-ing source.¹⁹ So far, I have not mentioned discourse-participants in any way. They come in play

19In modal semantics, it is often assumed that there is a unique set of worlds that are ideal according to a given

2.2. Semantics-pragmatics

when we take into account that modals are interpreted not only relative to conversational back-grounds, but also anindividual(a subject, an attitude holder, or a speaker) and atime(of an event, an attitude event, or a speech event) (Hacquard, 2006). Thus, we can say that the epis-temic assessment of the situation in (55) isanchoredto the speaker, i.e. a discourse participant;

the preceding sentence could now beIn view of what Alex knows now, Casey must have been home at a past time.

(55) (Alex:) Casey must have been home

In the proposal put forth in this dissertation, conversational backgrounds play an important role in the semantic analysis of the polar use of bound additives. Moreover, the contextual determi-nation of the relevant conversational backgrounds can be seen as a direct source of inspiration for the general analysis of additives as being ‘flexible’ in a number of discourse-sensitive ways.²⁰ In conclusion, the formal model of discourse contexts adopted in this dissertation contains a number of different sets of propositions (the common groundc g, the public discourse commit-ments of a discourse participantD C_X, sets of propositions that are derived through conversa-tional backgroundsf(w)andg(w)), and a stack of QUDs (theT a b l e). All of these components will be shown to be relevant for the analysis of the meaning of bound additives in Finnish in the later chapters of this book.