A Pragmatic Approach to Subsentential Speech:

The Case of Disjunctive Questions

Eleni SavvaUniversity of Cambridge

Kasia M. Jaszczolt University of Cambridge

and Michael HaughGriffith University

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Incomplete utterances/sentence fragments/subsentential speech

Incomplete structures that convey complete thoughts/are meaningful when used in conversation

Topic of interest for:

•Pragmatics (e.g. Stainton 2006)•Syntax and semantics (e.g. Merchant 2004) •Modelling dialogue (e.g. Ginzburg 2012; Gregoromichelaki and Kempson forthcoming)

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Why subsentential utterances?

Good testing ground for issues related to the syntax/pragmatics interface, i.e. the interaction between the information derivable from: (i) the structure(ii) pragmatic inferenceor (iii) default (automatic) processes.

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A case in point:

Incomplete disjunction ‘p or…’ , in particular in interrogative constructions, with the second disjunct missing – unpronounced or even ‘unthought’.

Is that sort of official or...?

ICE-GB: S1A-071 105 (casual conversation about room rental)

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Rationale

Incompleteness (in this case, open-endedness):

•Conveys a range of meanings that go beyond the linguistic structure

•Frequent phenomenon in discourse we cannot exclude it from our account of meaning

•Solution: a pragmatic account through an analysis of the empirical facts

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Objectives•To offer theoretically-motivated explanations for the primary meanings of incomplete disjunctive interrogatives in naturally-occurring interactions;

•To provide evidence for the inadequacy of syntactic solutions to tackle such constructions;

•To attempt a typology of such constructions;

•To provide a compositional representation of such expressions using the theoretical framework of Default Semantics.

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Subsentential speech: the problemExamples:(1) A: When is Anna coming to Oxford?

B: Tomorrow [Anna is coming to Oxford].

 (2) A person walks in while I talk to a friend. Both of us notice him. I utter to my friend:

‘My brother’ [the person who has just walked in/you see is].?[this is]  (3) Two friends are playing scrabble. One of them places a word on the board. The other sees it, calculates for a few moments, and then grasps his pen and utters:

‘Twenty’. [Your word is worth twenty points][You get twenty points for this round][I’m noting down twenty points for you] etc. 

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Subsentential speech: syntax vs. pragmatics

Where the recoverable completion is to be found:

The syntactic approach (e.g. Merchant 2004, 2010; Stanley 2000, 2007): the non-overtly communicated aspects of meaning are present in the structure but are left unpronounced. All cases of subsentential speech: a kind of syntactic ellipsis.

The pragmatic approach (e.g. Barton 1990; Stainton 2006): recovery of meaning is guided by contextual information and top-down pragmatic enrichment. Structural incompleteness: not a problem; completion is placed on a higher level of representation.

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The syntactic approach: Merchant’s (2004) ‘Limited Ellipsis Account’

A person walks in while I talk to a friend. Both of us notice him. I utter to my friend:‘My brother’. [This is] my brother.

As a response to an offer of a second piece of chocolate:‘I really shouldn’t’.I really shouldn’t [do it].

Cases in question are this way as context-dependent as any utterance requiring reference resolution.

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Problems with the syntactic approach:• Vacuous solution from a semantic/pragmatic point of view (see Bach 1994, 2001, 2007);

• Not economical, not cognitively justified;

• Inadequacy to capture the empirical facts:

Cases with completions indeterminate in structure:

Two friends are playing scrabble. One of them places a word on the board. The other sees it, calculates for a few moments, and then grasps his pen and utters:‘Twenty’.

Cases such as open-ended disjunction:‘p or…?’

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Database of incomplete disjunctive interrogatives

•Great British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) 55 instances of the type ‘p or …’. 65.45% of which: interrogatives (Savva)

•Australian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-AUS) and the Griffith Corpus of Spoken Australian English (GCSAusE), both accessible through the Australian National Corpus (Haugh).

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Incomplete disjunctive questions with the second disjunct left unpronounced

(1) Is that sort of official or...?

ICE-GB: S1A-071 105 (casual conversation about room rental)

(2) Would it be typed documents or...?

ICE-GB: S1A-024 045 (talking about a corpus of texts)

(3) Uh from the solo you mean or...?

ICE-GB: S1A-021 081 (rehearsing a song)12

A typology of incomplete disjunctive interrogatives on the basis of their pragmatic properties:

(i)Genuine information-seeking questions

(ii) Indirect speech acts (a request/suggestion is achieved through a question)

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(i) Genuine information-seeking questions

(i.a) Polar Is that sort of official or...?ICE-GB: S1A-071 105 (casual conversation about room

rental)

Polar interpretation (not official): more accessible than local, e.g. ‘oral agreement’, ‘written down but unofficial’, ‘not official but witnessed’ etc.

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(i) Genuine information-seeking questions (i.b) Local

(i.b') communicating a closed set of alternatives Would it be typed documents or...?ICE-GB: S1A-024 045 (talking about a corpus of texts)

‘Typed documents’ invites local alternatives, e.g. ‘handwritten notes’, ‘recordings’, ‘electronic file’ etc.

(i.b'') communicating an open set of alternativesUh from the solo you mean or...? ICE-GB: S1A-021 081 (rehearsing a song)

‘From the solo’ has a very extensive range of alternatives: almost anywhere in the score.

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(ii) Indirect speech acts

(ii.a) ‘Or’ as general-purpose discourse marker, e.g. in polite requests. No completion intended.

Would you mind moving your car a bit or...? [I am hereby being polite.]

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(ii)Indirect speech acts

(ii.b) ‘Or’ as hedge:

(ii.b') of propositional content of uttered disjunct:Shall we meet in Grantchester at the railway station or...? [perhaps

Grantchester doesn’t have a railway station]

(ii.b'') of illocutionary force associated with its use:

Could you go and fetch some wood for the fire or...? [in fact I will go and do it] 

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(ii)Indirect speech acts

(ii.c) Incomplete disjunction joining two speech acts where the second is easily recoverable.

Exclusive use:Could you please arrive on time or...? [perhaps warn me if you

are going to be late?] (intended as exclusive: giving an alternative whereby the

speaker is permitted to be late)

Inclusive use:Could you try eating less wheat or...? [take more exercise] (intended as inclusive, say, in the context of medical

advice)18

What the study of incomplete disjunctive interrogatives in discourse reveals:•Range of alternative completions, some unpredictable or not thought of;

•Possible completions: accessible through common purpose at hand, background information, socio-cultural or group norms etc.

•Motivation behind their (frequent) use: Politeness through ‘adjusting the epistemic gradient’ (Haugh 2011: 210), or through relaxing the ‘exhaustivity presupposition for mentioned alternatives’ (Biezma and Rawlins 2012: 361).

oWith open-endedness the speaker allows the addressee freedom of choice with regards to the range of possible completions.

oEven when disjunction is intended as polar the speaker’s withdrawal from explicitly uttering the alternative also functions as a polite/face-saving move. 19

Conclusion so far:

•Diversity of conveyed meanings of incomplete disjunctive interrogatives can only be investigated through a pragmatic account that takes into consideration all information available in discourse.

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Default Semantics for Missing Disjuncts

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Default Semantics (Jaszczolt 2005, 2010, in progress)

• A radical contextualist approach

• Primary meanings are modelled as merger representations.

•The outputs of sources of information about meaning merge and all the outputs are treated on an equal footing. The syntactic constraint is abandoned.

•Merger representations have the status of mental representations.

•They have a compositional structure.22

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world knowledge (W K) word meaning and sentence structure (W S) situation of discourse (SD) stereotypes and presumptions properties of human inferential system (IS) about society and culture (SC) Fig. 1: Sources of information contributing to a m erger representation Σ

merger representation Σ

Sources operate on an equal footing, logical form can be overridden:

A: Shall we have lunch?B: I have eaten. >> B doesn’t want to have lunch.

>> B has eaten lunch today.

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sources of information types of processes

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Primary meaning: combination of word meaning and sentence structure (W S) conscious pragmatic inferencepm

(from situation of discourse, social and social, cultural and cognitive defaults (CD) cultural assumptions, and world world-knowledge defaultspm (SCW D pm) knowledge) (CPIpm) Secondary meanings:

Social, cultural and world-knowledge defaultssm (SCW Dsm) conscious pragmatic inferencesm (CPIsm)

Fig. 2: Utterance interpretation according to the processing model of the revised version of Default Sem antics

merger representation Σ

Mapping between sources and processes

WK SCWD or CPISC SCWD or CPIWS WS (logical form)SD CPIIS CD

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Are completions of disjunctive sentences always inferential?CPI rather than SCWD or CD?

Haugh (2011): completions rely on salient meanings (pragmatic defaults). The choice between the exclusive and the inclusive meaning relies on the socio-pragmatic (or discursive) default: the exclusive meaning is such a default interpretation (SCWD).

evidence from corpora of Australian spoken English 28

Jaszczolt, Savva and Haugh forthcoming

The exclusive disjunction as a cognitive default:

•stronger referential intention and stronger intentionality (CD)

•source of information: properties of the human inferential system (IS)

cf. the explanation through scales: <and, or>29

An inclusive reading can be processed either inferentially (CPI) or subdoxastically, as defaults (SCWD).

‘We will need twenty informants, or (should I say) consultants, for the pilot study.’

No cancellation à la Levinson (2000)30

The meaning of ‘default’

defaults for the speaker and for the context:

pragmatically defined, automatically achieved, subdoxastic readings

‘[T]hose arguing against the existence of default inferencing have been locating defaults in the wrong place’ (Haugh 2011: 217).

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The inclusive reading will only arise by default in downward-entailing contexts (cf. Chierchia 2004)  ‘I haven’t met anyone who would like earwigs or cockroaches.’

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Other socio-pragmatic defaults (SCWD) in incomplete disjunctive interrogatives:

‘not-saying through utterance-final disjunction interrogatives is a recurrent and recognisable discursive practice in casual spoken English’ (Haugh 2011: 206)

This practice is facilitated by the fact that the polar reading (‘p or not p’) is the presumed, salient (CD) one:

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‘Is that sort of official or…?’ICE-GB: S1A-071105

CD: intentionality, as a property of the human inferential system (IS), gears our reasoning to the strongest possible alternative (polar).

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Localism vs. globalism

Default meanings and inference-driven meanings arise on the basis of units of different length, as appropriate for the context at hand, and therefore neither strict localism (Levinson 2000) nor globalism (Geurts 2010) is preferred:‘flexible inferential bases’ and ‘fluid characters’ (Jaszczolt 2012)

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Utilising focus

‘Does Lidia like [cats]F or ...?’

The focused element introduces a variable that is given a value by the set of alternatives that itself constitutes the semantic value of the complete question.

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Alternative semantics (e.g. Rooth 1996)

[[Lidia likes [cats]F]]f

Lidia likes x.<x [like (l, x)], c>

The analysis is presuppositional: ‘Lidia likes [x]’ introduces a presupposition that x belongs to a set. Next, the variable x has to find an antecedent. The antecedent for x is construed as the semantic value of a question.

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Rooth (1996: 278):

‘...the ultimate source of the alternative set is the semantics and/or pragmatics of questions: questions determine sets of possible answers. Focus seems to evoke this alternative set in a presuppositional way, indicating that it is present for independent reasons.’

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But: in incomplete questions the second disjunct may not even be clear to the speaker; it may not even be intended.

The semantics of focus construed as a presuppositional analysis will have to be ‘pragmaticised’: we have to attend to the mechanism of finding alternatives (accommodation).

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The account generalizes to the entire category, including open-ended disjunction, politeness-disjunction (e.g. a metalinguistic second disjunct: ‘...or perhaps I shouldn’t have asked?’) and a ‘discourse marker or’.

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Merger Representations

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(i.a) polar question

(i.b) local question(i.b') communicating a closed set or (i.b'') communicating an open set of

alternatives.

Default (CD): exclusive, (p q) (p q))42

(1) ‘Is that sort of official or...?’ (polar)

ICE-GB: S1A-071 105 (casual conversation about room rental)

(2) ‘Would it be typed documents or...?’ (local, closed set)

ICE-GB: S1A-024 045 (talking about a corpus of texts)

(3) ‘Uh from the solo you mean or...?’ (local, open set)

ICE-GB: S1A-021 081 (rehearsing a song)

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Fig. 3. Σ for example (1): ‘Is that sort of official or...?’ (incomplete polar question)

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Fig. 4. Σ for example (2): ‘Would it be typed documents or...?’ (incomplete local question, closed set)

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Fig. 5. Σ for example (3): ‘Uh from the solo you mean or...?’ (incomplete local question, open set/polar)

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Universalism

von Fintel and Matthewson (2008): connectives as a semantic/conceptual universal

Mauri and van der Auwera (2012): Wari’, the juxtaposition of modal clauses ‘perhaps p, perhaps q’ p q ╞ p q

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Conclusions

•Incomplete disjunctive questions provide evidence for a pragmatics-rich, contextualist approach to incomplete utterances and against syntactic solutions.

•The diversity of types of intended completions can be accounted for in terms of compositional merger representations of DS.

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A Pragmatic Approach to Subsentential Speech:The Case of Disjunctive Questions

Eleni Savva (University of Cambridge)es572@cam.ac.uk

Kasia M. Jaszczolt (University of Cambridge)kmj21@cam.ac.uk

Michael Haugh (Griffith University)m.haugh@griffith.edu.au

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