Philosophy of language

Perspective (graphical)

Utterance

Grammaticality

Interrogative

Biology

Pragmatics

Epistemology

Philosophy

Paleontology

Artificial intelligence

Natural language

Metaphysics

Semantics (computer science)

Programming language

Natural language processing

Grammar

Sentence

Context (archaeology)

Computer science

Linguistics

Linguistics and Philosophy

Utterances of natural language sentences can be used to communicate not just contents, but also forces. This paper examines this topic from a cross-linguistic perspective on sentential mood (declarative, interrogative, imperative). Recent work in this area focuses on conversational dynamics: the three sentence types can be associated with distinctive kinds of conversational effects called sentential forces, modeled as three kinds of updates to the discourse context. This paper has two main goals. First, it provides two arguments, on empirical and methodological grounds, for treating sentential force (context update rules) as part of a compositional dynamic semantics, rather than a dynamic pragmatics. Second, it formulates a minimal dynamic semantic analysis that covers the data at the heart of these arguments, incorporating existing analyses of the three major moods, evidentials and conjunction. A further aim of the paper is to sharpen the distinction between sentential force and utterance (illocutionary) force, and discuss its implications.

The structure of communicative acts