Metacommunicative-why fragments as probes into the grammar of the speech act layer

What it is about

A reply of just "Why?" to a question can mean "why are you asking me that?" (meta-why), not "for what reason?" The paper collects the conditions under which this reading is available. It is possible only after an information-seeking, interrogatively typed matrix question. It is not possible after echo questions, declarative questions, rhetorical questions, interrogative exclamatives, declaratives, or indirect questions ("She wonders whether Sam is coming" does not license it). Only the addressee of the question may use it, and it targets the questioner's private motives, so it is ruled out when those motives are already shared. The core datum holds in at least twenty languages. The authors argue that meta-why is a fragment of a full question: it shows the diagnostics of ellipsis (German case connectivity, binding, preposition stranding, island insensitivity) and does not have the scope behaviour of sluicing. The proposal is that ForceP is elided under a question-headed illocutionary act phrase, inside a speech act phrase. The paper gives no corpus counts; the evidence is acceptability judgements.

Ideas

• I1. A deterministic licence check for short "Why?" turns in prag: the previous turn must be an information-seeking matrix question, judged from its clause type (en/src/tag.rs, the parse's mood and clause features) and from the speech act label. Build a test set from the paper's examples (3) to (12) and require zero false positives on the declarative, echo, rhetorical and embedded (indirect) cases.
• I2. Keep the questioner's motive as a frame slot, not as a sentence: when a question is stored, record the speaker's background as a set (BTreeSet) of facts. A meta-why answer is then "the facts the questioner has and the addressee lacks", which is checkable: if the set is already shared, the answer is "rejected", as the paper's (28) shows.
• I3. Use the paper's ellipsis diagnostics as tests of Mova's own fragment handling: a stripped "Why Sally?" should keep the case, the binding and the preposition of the antecedent ("Did Ashley talk to Jamie? Why to Jamie?"). A roundtrip check of the stripped fragment against the antecedent frame is a deterministic measure.
• I4. Map the three readings of "why" (purpose, reason, meta) to distinct answer types in world/src/qa.rs, with a table keyed by the answer type in a BTreeMap. Measure how often a bare "Why?" after a question is given the meta reading when the question is a matrix one.

For Mova

The chapters are 38. Dialogue, discourse markers and reported speech (short replies and discourse markers), 31. Speech acts (illocutionary act and question acts), 26. Questions (clause types and interrogatives) and 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure (fragments and remnants). The code is prag/src/infer.rs and prag/src/rsa.rs for the speech act and reading choice, world/src/qud.rs for the question under discussion that a meta-why would target, and world/src/qa.rs for the answer. The measure is the licence check of I1 on the paper's example set, with the negative controls, run twice to confirm it is identical.

Topics: Speech act theory

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.1169

@article{woods2021metacommunicative,
  title = {{Metacommunicative-why fragments as probes into the grammar of the speech act layer}},
  author = {Woods, Rebecca and Vicente, Luis},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.1169},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1169}
}

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50. TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Woods, Rebecca and Luis Vicente. 2021. Metacommunicative-why fragments as probes into the grammar of the speech act layer. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6(1): 84. 1–32. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1169 ↗
51. Submitted: 06 December 2019 Accepted: 18 May 2021 Published: 01 July 2021 find
52. COPYRIGHT: © 2021 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. ↗

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