Speech Act Phrase, Conjectural Questions, and Hearer
Penn collection
Degree type
Discipline
Subject
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
Distributor
Related resources
Author
Contributor
Abstract
Speech Act Phrase is proposed by Speas and Tenny (2003) as a projection hosting discourse roles such as Speaker and Hearer. Miyagawa (2012) argues for its existence by looking at Japanese WH-questions. His proposal is that the politeness marker motivates the presence of Hearer, which is necessary in information-seeking questions. In this paper, I deal with conjectural questions, which do not require the presence of Hearer, and argue for the relevance of Speaker to them. In particular, I examine the behavior of yara-conjectural questions and daroo ka-conjectural questions. I suggest that they contain a modal projection, whose Spec hosts a Point-of-View operator, whose value is determined by the closest c-commanding sentient element. In conjectural questions, Speaker is the only relevant c-commander, since they are typically uttered in soliloquy. I also consider polite versions of such questions, which involve Hearer. Despite the presence of Hearer, which is due to the presence of a politeness marker, the conjectural question interpretation is allowed in these questions. This is, I argue, because in these questions, unlike in information-seeking questions, Hearer is positioned lower than CP, which makes Speaker the only sentient c-commander of the Point-of-View operator. This analysis can be applied to cover the pattern of Jussive clauses as well.