Ahmad Jabbar

This paper presents a study into the Hindi-Urdu 'na' as a sentence-final particle. Although also used as a topic marker and negation, 'na' occurs sentence-finally across clause-types. In light of the data, we think the following hypothesis offers the best fit: 'na' signals the speaker’s belief that the content of na’s containing clause is a reasonable inference, given what’s common ground. Notably, in addition to other clause-types, we explore na's distribution in exclamations and exclamatives. We link our work to recent research on the polar question particle 'kya' in Hindi-Urdu.

Recent scoreboard models of conversation, in addition to modeling update effects of assertions and questions, also make sense of how one may react to such discourse moves. An account of acceptance and rejection is captured by Farkas & Bruce (2010), while Bledin & Rawlins (2020) have recently made sense of how one may resist an assertion too. For rejection and resistance of assertions, truth comes out to be a crucial notion. Between X and Y, if Y doesn't believe p to be true, then Y might resist or reject X's assertion of p. For questions however, truth cannot serve this purpose. A complete model of discourse would seek to offer explanation of resisting questions. Much like Bledin & Rawlins, one can non-exhaustively enumerate a class of resistance moves. In many ways, one can resist a request to make a particular question QUD. In this paper, we raise following question: which notion can serve to explain question uptake in discourse? In our paper, we show how the expected utility value (EUV) of questions can serve this role for questions. EUV is used by van Rooij (2003) to give an account of interpretation of questions; we think it can serve our intended purposes too. To demonstrate plausibility, we build a workable formalism.

We propose a framework that makes space for both non-indexical contextualism and assessment-sensitivity. Such pluralism is motivated by considering possible variance in judgments about retraction. We conclude that the proposed pluralism, instead of problematizing, vindicates defining truth of a proposition w.r.t. a context of utterance and a context of assessment. To implement this formally, we formalize initialization of parameters by contexts. Then, a given parameter, depending on a speaker's judgment, can get initialized by either the context of utterance or the context of assessment. An upshot of the proposal is that one need not exclusively espouse one of non-indexical contextualism or assessment-sensitivity about a particular class of expressions, for instance predicates of personal taste, in language; one can be pluralist in this sense. (This manuscript is part of an ongoing research project).

We consider a puzzle in the question semantics literature. The puzzle concerns data when 'know' embeds interrogative complements. For the exhaustive strength in the literature known as intermediately exhaustive, first person ascriptions don't seem to exist, but third person do. By arguing against the only solution in the literature, we suggest that the puzzle is more interesting than previously thought. We provide a compositional semantics for 'know' where the interpretation of 'know' is relativized to an information state. The proposed semantics, we think, is compatible with relativism and nonindexical contextualism, but we opt for relativism for its relative ease in capturing disagreement data we provide.