We identify “undirected speculation” (US) utterances as a category of possible discourse moves in English. In such utterances, a speaker offers a question or inquisitive declarative (frequently of the form I wonder whether p), without committing to the content of the proposition, and crucially, without assuming that the hearer will acknowledge/respond to this move. Unlike traditional interrogatives, the hearer can felicitously ignore the “undirected speculation” and all previously available conversational moves remain licit.

 

Our analysis advances the “conversational scoreboard” tradition of dialogue modelling (Lewis, 1979; Roberts, 1996; Farkas & Bruce, 2010; Malamud & Stevenson, 2015). Farkas & Bruce (2010) models the discourse behavior of polar questions and assertions, and the possible confirming and reversing reactions available to each. For instance, issuing a polar question places the question (p∨¬p) on the Table (the locus of at-issue content), forcing the gameboard into an inquisitive state and thereby requiring “conversational moves following a (polar) question...to attend to getting the question removed from the Table” (Farkas & Bruce, 2010:96). Building on this model, Malamud & Stevenson (2015) accounts for a range of declarative force modifiers, enriching the dialogue gameboard: a speaker’s tentative commitments and predictions about other participants’ beliefs are captured by listing the possible future states of each speakers’ set of discourse commitments.

 

We argue that a US may have essentially the same denotation as a polar question, but affects the gameboard in a distinct way: the hearer is not obligated to address the question and therefore it cannot be the case that a US is placed directly on the Table. In our revised model, the speaker issuing a polar US is offering two possible future gameboard states ({<(p∨¬p),...>,<...>}). In the first, the hearer responds to the question and so the US is placed on the Table, and in the alternative, the hearer ignores the US (e.g. by uttering something which is not a response to it) - thus the Table remains in its current (potentially empty) state. Upon the next discourse move, one of these projected states becomes the current state of the Table. Malamud & Stevenson (2011) considered a similar modification to the dialogue gameboard in their account of declarative force modifiers, but dropped this in their 2015 analysis of the same phenomena. We believe that “undirected speculation” provides independent evidence for the need to incorporate possible future states of the Table into the dialogue gameboard model.

 

References

Farkas, D., & Bruce, K. (2010). On Reacting to Assertions and Polar Questions. Journal of Semantics, 27: 81–118.

Lewis, D. (1979). Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8: 339–359.

Malamud, S.A., & Stephenson, T. (2011). Three Ways to Avoid Commitments: Declarative Force Modifiers in the Conversational Scoreboard. In Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, 74–83.

Malamud, S.A., & Stephenson, T. (2015). Three Ways to Avoid Commitments: Declarative Force Modifiers in the Conversational Scoreboard. Journal of Semantics, 32: 275–311.

Roberts, C. (1996). Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, 49.