Nothing to claim: claim reports and non-endorsement
Natasha Korotkova, Pranav Anand
May 2025 

While there has been much research on the typology of speech reports, the variety of communicative predicates has remained largely understudied. In line with the growing body of work on the fine-grained semantics of clause-taking predicates, we explore possible distinctions within the communicative group by zooming in on the behavior of the English verb 'claim'. Our main focus is what we call the NON - ENDORSEMENT PUZZLE: a distinct sense that the speaker is not fully on board with the content of a claim report. We ruminate on possible sources of this effect, such as the speaker’s doxastic state or insufficient evidence, and conclude that non-endorsement is not conventionally encoded, but arises due to the properties of discourses described by claim. We argue that it reports assertions that have not been accepted (yet) and that the gap between the proposal and its possible acceptance is responsible for the sense that claim reports something less than an ideal Gricean assertion.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/009014 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	A Festschrift in Honour of Regine Eckardt
keywords:	assertion, attitudes, semantics/pragmatics division of labor, speech reports, semantics
Downloaded:	113 times

 

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