Rising Declaratives and the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface

Rising declaratives provide a test case for theories of how clause types relate to speech acts at the semantics-pragmatics interface. For example, matrix declarative clauses are canonically used to make assertions, and so usually commit the speaker to the truth of the proposition they express, as well as signal the speaker's goal of having the addressee believe that proposition as well. However, produce a declarative with the rising intonation typically used in a polar question, and it now seems to be used to ask a question. In English, the resulting rising declarative has a special pragmatic requirement that there be some contextual evidence in favor of the proposition denoted by the clause. Any attempt to explain why clause types have the pragmatic effects they do will also need to explain this exception to the rule.

In this talk, I show that the facts are more complex than typically assumed, and that dealing with this complication casts some new light on the semantics-pragmatics interface. The complication is that, while rising declaratives are frequently used to ask questions, they can also be used to make assertions much like falling declaratives, and there is reason to believe that the grammatical ingredients involved—declarative clauses and polar question rises—are the same across these two different uses. I argue that the grammatical ingredients deserve a unified semantics across their different uses, and offer an explanation for how semantics, context, and pragmatics conspire to produce the speech act interpretations observed.