Everything that rises must converge
Daniel Goodhue
January 2024 

In English, matrix declaratives with a final rising intonation typical of polar questions are frequently used as a kind of biased question: they can only be used when there is contextual evidence in favor of the proposition denoted by the declarative. However, not all rising declaratives are used to pose a question about their content---some are used to assert the content of the declarative, while raising a second issue. In this paper, I offer a unified account of rising declaratives that seeks to explain both of these kinds of uses while positing unitary meanings for clause types and intonations. This goal cannot be achieved if we take the illocutionary force of an utterance to be completely determined by clause type and intonation, as many recent accounts have done. Instead, I propose that clause type and intonation merely constrain what a speaker could intend to do with them; pragmatic inference must play a key role in enabling an audience to uncover the speaker's illocutionary intention. In other words, there can be no hard and fast conventional discourse effects tied to particular clause type + intonation pairings. I demonstrate that the proposed account enables a derivation of assertive force, and comparisons to other recent accounts are made.

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Reference:	lingbuzz/006493 (please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords:	rising declarative, assertion, question, speech act, illocutionary force, intonation, pragmatics, implicature, semantics
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