TY  - CHAP
A1  - Law, Jess H.-K.
A1  - Li, Haoze
A1  - Bhadra, Diti
T1  - Questioning speech acts
T2  - Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22, Vol. 2 / eds. Uli Sauerland and Stephanie Solt. Berlin, Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft: ZAS papers in linguistics ; Nr. 61
N2  - The function of mapping from the semantic content of an utterance to its convention of use (a division of labor first made by Frege (1956)) has been attributed to abstract speech act operators (also known as force operators), such as ASSERT, QUESTION, and COMMAND. These operators have been traditionally assumed to occupy the highest echelons of the clausal periphery. The precise formulation of these operators has attracted a lot of attention from semanticists, as they are crucial for formalizing the diverse discourse functions of speech acts (Farkas and Bruce, 2009; Farkas and Roelofsen, 2017; Malamud and Stepheson, 2015; Krifka, 2015). These high operators usually come packaged with two assumptions: i) they are not embeddable under other elements, and ii) they belong to the realm of pure pragmatics and not compositional semantics. Recent research in both semantics and syntax have challenged these assumptions (Krifka, 2015; Davis, 2011; Wiltschko, 2017; Heim et al., 2016). Based on evidence from a language with a rich array of sentence-final particles (SFPs), Cantonese, we argue in this paper that not only are abstract speech operators embeddable, it is also the case that we need compositional mechanisms in these high regions of the clause. We will investigate the SFP stacking phenomenon, and argue that such grammaticalized operations on speech act operators reveal the need for a system that can compose the content of an utterance with multiple particles that update the discourse in a number of different, non-trivial ways.
KW  - speech acts
KW  - sentence-final particles
KW  - Cantonese
KW  - update semantics
Y1  - 2020
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/55833
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-558339
SN  - 1435-9588
SN  - 0947-7055
SP  - 53
EP  - 70
PB  - Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS)
CY  - Berlin
ER  -