Pragmatic Markers and Propositional Attitude

In interactive discourse we not only express propositions, but we also express different attitudes to them. That is, we communicate how our mind entertains those propositions that we express. A speaker is able to express an attitude of belief, desire, hope, doubt, fear, regret or pretence that a given proposition represents a true state of affairs. This collection of papers explores the contribution of particles and other uninflected mood-indicating function words to the expression of propositional attitude in the broad sense. Some languages employ this type of attitude-marking device extensively, even for the expression of basic moods and basic speech act categories, other languages use such markers sparsely and always in interaction with syntactic form. Both types of language are examined in this volume, which includes studies of attitudinal markers in Amharic, English, Gascon, Occitan, German, Greek, Hausa, Hungarian, Japanese, Norwegian and Swahili. The theoretical emphasis is on issues such as interpretive vs. descriptive use of utterances or utterance parts, procedural semantics, linguistic underdetermination of the proposition expressed and the speaker’s communicated attitude to it, higher-level explicatures in the relevance-theoretic sense, the explicit — implicit distinction, as well as processes of grammaticalization and negotiation of propositional attitude in spoken interaction.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction (by Andersen, Gisle); 2. The role of the pragmatic marker like in utterance interpretation (by Andersen, Gisle); 3. Particles, propositional attitude and mutual manifestness (by Blass, Regina); 4. Procedural encoding of propositional attitude in Norwegian conditional clauses (by Fretheim, Thorstein); 5. Incipient decategrorization of MONO and grammaticalization of speaker attitude in Japanese discourse (by Fujii, Seiko); 6. Procedural encoding of explicatures by the Modern Greek particle taha (by Ifantidou, Elly); 7. Linguistic encoding of the guarantee of relevance: Japanese sentence-final particle YO (by Matsui, Tomoko); 8. Markers of general interpretive use in Amharic and Swahili (by Nicolle, Steve); 9. The attitudinal meaning of preverbal markers in Gascon: Insights from the analysis of literary and spoken language data (by Pusch, Claus Dieter); 10. Actually and other markers of an apparent discrepancy between propositional attitudes of conversational partners (by Smith, Sara W.); 11. Surprise and animosity: The use of the copula da in quotative sentences in Japanese (by Suzuki, Satoko); 12. The interplay of Hungarian de (but) and is (too, either) (by Vasko, Ildiko); 13. Index