True to Form: Rising and Falling Declaratives as Questions in English Christine Gunlogson This dissertation is concerned with the meaning and use of two kinds of declarative sentences: (1) It’s raining? (2) It’s raining. The difference between (1) and (2) is intonational: (1) has a final rise (indicated by the question mark), while (2) ends with a fall. The central claim of the thesis is that t...

Questions in spoken dialogues are often uttered in a declarative form. In more than 50% the question function of these utterances cannot be recognized without contex-tual features. Therefore, a speaker must, at the risk of misunderstanding, have special reasons for using a declarative form instead of an interrogative one. Two experiments were carried out to determine the contextual features tha...

penalty clause or liquidated damage which is formerly agreed between parties is legally examined and accepted as a rule. although judge could in some circumstances modify this stipulation. yet its economic analysis which is focused on economic efficiency can be considered as a “major unexplained puzzle in the economic theory of law”. this article compares the major legal systems in the case of ...

It is a standard assumption that subordinate clauses like relative, embedded declarative, and interrogative clauses in natural language vary according to their morphosyntactic and semantic characteristics. Their morphosyntactic variation is expressed in the presence/absence of a wh-word, a relative pronoun, or an overt complementizer; syntactic transparency (embedded declaratives) or opacity (e...

Wh-exclamatives are, arguably, a formally individuated class of clauses that are conventionally associated with a particular use, on a par with declaratives, interrogatives, or imperatives. The characteristics that set them apart formally have been discussed at length by Elliott (1974), Grimshaw (1979), Gutiérrez-Rexach (1996), among many others. In English, the most prominent property of matri...

Wilson and Sperber (1988a; Sperber and Wilson 1986) have proposed semantic analyses of declaratives, imperatives and interrogatives which are based on the notion of "a direct semantic link between linguistic form and representations of propositional attitude". They claim, however, that the various syntactic structures encode "procedural" rather than "conceptual" information. Rather than encodin...

Abstract This paper provides the first formal account of meaning pragmatic marker ejsze in Székely (Szekler) dialect Hungarian. Using standard diagnostics sentence types, we argue that it is compatible with declaratives and constituent interrogatives but not polar interogatives. We suggest makes a contribution analogous to German wohl declaratives, its use-conditional can be described along lin...

Traditional grammars typically manage to describe imperatives in just a few pages, suggesting there is not much to be said about them, nor to be learned from them. After a somewhat slow start, work on imperatives has really taken off, and many interesting properties of imperatives have now been uncovered (see van der Wurff, this volume, for an overview). Imperatives are relatively short and occ...

There are many formal systems in the field of logic of questions. (See nice overviews in [2] and [3].) If we omit pragmatically oriented theories, then there are two known approaches working within erotetic inferential structures: Groenendijk-Stokhof’s intensional approach [1] and the general theory of erotetic inferences proposed by Andrzej Wísniewski [4]. Even if we can meet some other theori...