The discourse commitments of illocutionary reportatives

What it is about

The paper studies the reportative evidential of Cuzco Quechua, a suffix meaning roughly «I was told». A speaker can use it for a claim they then deny («They left me money, I was told — but no, they didn't leave me a sol»), so it is not an assertion; yet the reported claim can answer the question under discussion, enter discourse relations and, if nobody objects, become common ground. The solution splits the speaker, after Goffman, into the animator who utters and the principal whose commitment is conveyed. A declarative brings three defaults: the principal is committed to the content, the animator has adequate evidence, and principal = animator; together they make an assertion. The reportative overrides the last two. When the animator does not object, Walker's Collaborative Principle (disagree at once or be taken to accept) gives them a weaker, dependent commitment. The analysis is set in Farkas & Bruce's commitment-based discourse model and extended to hedges and attitude verbs in general.

Ideas

• I1. Store who is committed to a fact. English marks report and hearsay with verbs and adverbs (they say, it is said, I was told, reportedly, apparently, according to X) and with every Say frame. A fact read from a quote or a report should keep its principal (the speaker of the Say frame) in the SLM student's memory, not become a plain world fact. «Did the fox own the cheese?» after «"The cheese is mine," said the fox» is then answered «the fox said so». A principal field on frames built from quote in prag/src/frames.rs; check with world knowledge diagnose how many wrong answers come from a character's claim taken as narrator fact.
• I2. Apply the Collaborative Principle as a reading rule: a character's claim that no one in the scene contradicts (no disagree, no negated frame on the same predicate later) is promoted to common ground with a «not contradicted» mark; a contradicted one stays the character's. Minimal pairs: a lie that is later exposed versus a report that goes unchallenged.
• I3. Add hearsay adverbs and phrases (reportedly, allegedly, supposedly, apparently, they say, I hear) to the hedge cues in prag/data/cues.tsv as their own class, separate from uncertainty hedges, since they shift commitment rather than lower certainty. Measure how many silver hedge=1 sentences they explain.

For Mova

32. Politeness and hedging §8 (epistemic modality and evidentiality), 38-dialogue-and-discourse-markers.md §7 (reported speech), 33-implicature-and-presupposition.md §7 (accommodation). Code: prag/src/frames.rs (principal of quoted frames), world/src/knowledge.rs (student memory), prag/data/cues.tsv. Measures: diagnosis counts for claims taken as facts; minimal-pair tests.

Topics: Discourse analysis · Speech act theory

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.12.8

@article{faller2019discourse,
  title = {{The discourse commitments of illocutionary reportatives}},
  author = {Faller, Martina T},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.12.8},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.8}
}

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