Origen Marco normativo y doctrina constitucional

I will be adopting the definition as put forward in (Farkas & Roelofsen, 2017), which means that I assume that speech acts affect both the commitment states of speakers and add a proposition to the Table.

We can think of a conversation as a game with an evolving score, and of speech acts as moves in such a game. This means that different speech acts change the score of the game in different ways: a speech act is something like a proposal to change the context set in a specific way—a proposal that is adopted if it is not rejected by one of the other parties to the conversation.

The basic intuition is that participants can only make one move at a time. While we can make up one move out of several moves by performing them in a consecutive order, we cannot perform different moves in parallel.

I therefore propose that speech act conjunction can be defined as function compo- sition: if speech acts are functions that update contexts, we can take conjunction to be the composition of two of those functions. The result of this will always be a function from contexts to contexts itself, and will therefore be a valid conversational move. (106) [ϕ“and”ψ] :=[ϕ]◦[ψ]

Applying a conjoined speech act to a context then, amounts to updating the original context with one conjunct and then subsequently updating the result with the second conjunct. The above therefore amounts to consecutive update of speech acts, just as is standardly assumed for conjunction in dynamic semantics.

(107) C[χ]=C[ϕ][ψ] where[χ]=[ϕ“and”ψ]

This means that we have the following for conjunctions. In a simple setting without any anaphoric relations between the speech acts, consecutive update will give a context in which the Table simply contains both propositions expressed by each speech act, and the speaker is committed to the informative content of both speech acts.

In order to remove these propositions from the Table, the speaker needs to resolve both issues. In terms of the resolution conditions, uttering two conjoined speech acts is therefore equivalent to uttering one speech act that adds the proposition on the Table which corresponds to the conjunction of the proposition expressed by each conjunct. We thus have that TC[ϕ][ψ] is resolvable for a contextC iffTC[ϕ∧ψ] is resolvable forC, where we say a Table is resolvable if all its issues in it can be resolved:

Definition 8. A Table T is resolvable in a context C iff there is an info state s s.t.cgC∩s,∅

and all issuesQof T are resolved bycgC∩s.

Conjoining questions is therefore allowed, since the hearer knows how to respond to them. So we should ask: what is the speech act that could correspond to the disjunction of two speech acts?

We cannot define disjunction of speech acts as the union of the context updated with each disjunct, as shown below. By our definition of a context, this will never yield a context again.

(108) C0_{=C[χ] :=C[ϕ]∪C[ψ] where[χ]=[ϕ“or”ψ]}

Perhaps a natural way to think of speech act disjunction is that it offers the addressee alternative contexts in some sense (cf. Krifka, 2004). For example, a speaker could offer a set of speech acts to the addressee, with the understanding that the addressee pick out one of the acts. But even in such a case, it would be unclear which issues are on the Table and how they could be resolved. That is, the only way to remove both issues from the Table is by resolving them both, but that would mean that, in terms of its resolution conditions, a disjoined speech act is equivalent to a conjoined speech act. To make sure that the addressee really has the option to resolve only one of the two issues raised, we would have to put the alternatives that each issue introduces in a single issue. But this would bring us back to our initial point: since this would require the disjunction to scope under Force.

In short, it is therefore difficult to imagine any reasonable way to define speech act disjunction. For disjunction, we may have to conclude that speech act disjunction is never a plausible operation on speech acts, because there is no disjunctive counterpart to function composition.

I thus assume that the wordand is, in a way, ambiguous. That is, andmay cor- respond to the generalized conjunction that applies on the level of the semantics to expressions of a T-reducible type, but it may also correspond to a non-boolean opera- tion on speech acts that corresponds to function composition. This second use ofandis perhaps similar to the way we often think of speech act-modifying adverbs, likefrankly, orhonestly, which specify certain aspects of the speech act itself.

The word or, on the other hand, only has a meaning in the semantics, and can therefore only be interpreted as generalized disjunction. This means thatorcan only be applied to constituents of a T-reducible type, below the ForceP level. Applying

orto speech acts will therefore always result in infelicity. I assume that the discourse component operates on ForcePs, and we can therefore not construct syntactic structures that are bigger than ForcePs. In this way, we must conclude that disjuncts in AltQs are never full ForcePs. Thus, we have ruled out the wide scope disjunction as shown below on the right. Consequently, the only possible structure for AltQs is the one on the left.

(109) ForceP Forceo _DisjP TypeP or TypeP DisjP* ForceP1 Forceo _TypeP or ForceP2 Forceo _TypeP

Two important questions remain unanswered at this point, however. First, if we assume that INTis introduced in Force, it is not clear how each disjunct gets its interrogative clause type marking. Second, how could this proposal be extended to the embedded case? I will address both issues in the next section.