Three Ways to Avoid Commitments: Declarative Force Modifiers in the Conversational Scoreboard

We discuss three English markers that modify the force of declarative utterances: reversepolarity tags (Tom’s here, isn’t he?), samepolarity tags (Tom’s here, is he?), and rising intonation (Tom’s here?). The di erences among them are brought out in dialogues with taste predicates (tasty, attractive) and vague scalar predicates applied to borderline cases (red for an orange-red object), with consequences for the correct model of conversation, common ground, and speech acts. Our proposal involves a conversational “scoreboard” that allows speakers to make strong or tentative commitments, propose changes or raise expectations about the Common Ground, strongly or tentatively propose issues to be resolved, and hazard guesses about other participants’ beliefs. This model allows for distinctions among speech acts that are subtle and fine-grained enough to account for the behavior of these three markers.

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