Force shift as speech act anchoring
Jess Law, Haoze Li, Diti Bhadra
December 2023 

This paper investigates force shift, a phenomenon in which the canonical discourse conventions, or force, associated with a clause type can be overridden to yield polar questions with the help of additional force-indicating devices. Previous studies attribute force shift to the presence of a complex question force component operating on semantic content. Based on utterance particles and particle clusters in Cantonese, we analyze force shift as resulting from compositional operations on force-bearing expressions. We propose that a simplex force, such as assertion or question, denotes unanchored sentence acts, while a force-shifting particle like Cantonese ho2 is an anchoring function anchoring a sentence act A to the speaker while query- ing whether or not the addressee can perform the sentence act A. The proposed semantics makes predictions about ho2’s interactions with addressee-changing operations and imperatives, as well as about a larger family of force shift phenomena.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006554 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Natural Language Semantics
keywords:	illocutionary force, discourse dynamics, force shift, speech acts, pragmatics, dynamic semantics, semantics
previous versions:	v2 [December 2023] v1 [April 2022]
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