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The main aim of this paper is to investigate the function of tones in construing neutral declarative statements, elicited in neutral contexts in the Thamari Dialect of Yemeni Arabic (DDYA), and then to contrast it with the intonational patterns of declarative statements construing surprise, and reservation, elicited in different contexts. This study examines these intonational patterns in the spontaneous speech within the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework (SFL). The system of tones is acoustically analyzed in this study by means of the PRAAT software program. Our main concern in this intonation system is to answer the question whether variant contexts trigger variant intonational patterns in the declarative Mood aspect of DDYA. The main criteria adopted to identify the marked and unmarked intonation pattern is the frequency of occurrence ratio. The intonational contour patterns are analyzed acoustically by eliciting the F0 contour on PRAAT. The data then is analyzed at different levels i.e. the phonological realizations of the intonation patterns, and the meanings and the speech functions they construe in the semantic level. Finally, in the statistical analysis, the data is grouped into two categories: congruent and incongruent patterns. The data showcases that two intonational approaches have been used by DDYA speakers to convey attitudinal expressions. While a Mid- Fall pattern is used to express facts of neutral mode, a Rise-Fall and a Fall-Rise patterns are used to convey surprise and reservation keys respectively.

This paper addresses matrix declarative sentences with the evidential markers dizque and como que in Colombian Spanish. We concentrate on cases where these evidentials combine with both clausal- and subclausal constituents, and provide a unified analysis that likens them to focus-sensitive items, such as Spanish solo \"only\". We thus argue that dizque and como que are mixed elements combining evidentiality and focus marking. We further discuss questionanswer congruence in connection to these markers, and show that sentences with them must be congruent with prior discourse. We provide a syntactic analysis that accounts for the distribution of dizque and como que. We further provide a semantic analysis of dizque and como que that captures their evidential meaning in combination with focus, which is tied to the implication of lack of certainty that sentences with these markers have.

The understanding of wh-in-situ questions relies naturally on contextual and prosodic information for their early discrimination from declarative sentences. However, there is scarce evidence on the parsing processes involved during the online incremental processing of these questions. In this study, we investigate the incremental reading of wh-in-situ sentences with no prosodic or contextual information available to aid the parser by comparing them to their declarative counterparts. We investigated two wh-in-situ languages: Mandarin Chinese (in-situ only) and French (optionally in situ). This comparison allows us to determine whether wh-in-situ questions are processed similarly across languages and whether the parsing process is related to language-specific question formation strategies. Results of four word-by-word self-paced reading experiments on two types of wh-in-situ phrases (simplex or complex) in Mandarin Chinese and French show an interpretation strategy in which the most frequent structure, declarative, is considered in both languages, independently of the available question formation strategy. Nevertheless, the timing of the online interpretation and the observed effects are affected by the nature of the wh-phrases (simplex or complex) and the definiteness of the noun phrases contained in the declaratives, which confirms that several processes occur concurrently introducing a limit on the capability to extract conclusions on the processes based solely on behavioral measures.

Imperative sentences admit of many different uses, from imposing obligations to answering questions, granting permissions, and giving advice. Some declarative sentences, such as statements about what one should do or about what the speaker wants one to do, can also serve similar purposes. These utterances all share a single discourse role. They work as directives, whose defining effect, I argue here, is to propose that their addressee publicly commit to performing an action. Understanding directives this way can help explain four core features of directive speech acts. For one, directives are subject to norms of consistency that accord with rational coherence requirements for intentions. Second, directives can answer questions about what the questioner is to do. Third and fourth, imperatives can seldom be used in conjunction with prioritizing modal and preference-expressing declaratives. I propose a strictly pragmatic explanation for these phenomena, with minimal semantic commitments. Priority modals and expressions of preference can only convey the same type of information as imperatives insofar as those declaratives can be used to indirectly tell their addressees what to do. Imperatives, in turn, propose executive commitments directly and can only induce doxastic commitments to priorities or speaker-preferences indirectly.

Below, the first coat-free humans appeared on sun-warmed afternoon sidewalks and pink flowers sprouted from the branches of redbud trees lining State Street. Two days before we were to be married.\" Because she gave each fact equal measure, and because it was couched between two ordinary declarative sentences, Helen did not immediately feel the horror of the suicide. \"The pinkish color comes from the keratin found in the shell of the crayfish that makes up the bird's diet. Spring Fling was the annual middle school dance, the first official opportunity for seventh graders to pair off outside of class.

This article investigates the speech by President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to determine the discursive strategies used to construct ingroup and outgroup identity, and the functions that these strategies perform. The bilateral speech delivered by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and President Joe Biden on June 28th, 2022 serve as the study’s data. Extracts from the speech were purposively sampled and subjected to critical analysis using Ruth Wodak’s (2009) Discourse Historical Approach. Findings reveal that nomination strategy is linguistically realised through reference, nominalization, material, mental and verbal processes. Nomination identifies the United States, Spain, Ukraine and Russia as the major social actors and categorizes the United States, Spain, and Ukraine as ingroup actors and Russia as outgroup actor. Through predication, the ingroup actors and their actions were metaphorically labelled positively using positive predicates and modifying adjectives. Conversely, the outgroup actor and its actions were framed negatively using negative predicates and modifying adjectives. The actions of the ingroup actors were legitimized using the topos of usefulness and advantage while those of the outgroup actor were delegitimized using the topoi of threat and danger. Perspectivisation, through the linguistic tools of reporting and describing, highlight the overt and conscious stance of ingroup actors as well as their involvement in the discourse while the factuality and validity of their propositions were registered through the intensification strategy linguistically realised through declarative sentences.

Sentence and construction types generally have more than one pragmatic function. Impersonal deontic declaratives such as ‘it is necessary to X’ assert the existence of an obligation or necessity without tying it to any particular individual. This family of statements can accomplish a range of functions, including getting another person to act, explaining or justifying the speaker's own behavior as he or she undertakes to do something, or even justifying the speaker's behavior while simultaneously getting another person to help. How is an impersonal deontic declarative fit for these different functions? And how do people know which function it has in a given context? We address these questions using video recordings of everyday interactions among speakers of Italian and Polish. Our analysis results in two findings. The first is that the pragmatics of impersonal deontic declaratives is systematically shaped by (i) the relative responsibility of participants for the necessary task and (ii) the speaker's nonverbal conduct at the time of the statement. These two factors influence whether the task in question will be dealt with by another person or by the speaker, often giving the statement the force of a request or, alternatively, of an account of the speaker's behavior. The second finding is that, although these factors systematically influence their function, impersonal deontic declaratives maintain the potential to generate more complex interactions that go beyond a simple opposition between requests and accounts, where participation in the necessary task may be shared, negotiated, or avoided. This versatility of impersonal deontic declaratives derives from their grammatical makeup: by being deontic and impersonal, they can both mobilize or legitimize an act by different participants in the speech event, while their declarative form does not constrain how they should be responded to. These features make impersonal deontic declaratives a special tool for the management of social agency.

In the present study, we investigate whether negation interacts with the set of alternatives that are elicited by why-questions. More precisely, we examine whether negation modifies the so-called contrast-class (set of alternatives) in the same way as negation interacts with other constructions, such as focal elements in declarative sentences. To this end, we conducted a multiple forced-choice experiment on Italian and German why-questions in which we examined this interaction in broad and narrow focus conditions in the presence and absence of negation. The results indicate that in both languages, the presence of a narrow focus changes the set of alternatives of a why-question in comparison to a broad focus interpretation, even in the presence of negation. These findings show that focus guides the creation of alternatives. They further imply that the effect of negation on the set of alternatives is pragmatic because negation does not modify the truth-conditional value of the alternatives and it remains the same in the presence or absence of the narrow focus. The addition of negation turns a set of false contrasting propositions into a set of true contrasting propositions.

This paper presents a new argument to defend the normativity of meaning, specifically the thesis that there are no meanings without norms. The argument starts from the observation inferentialists have emphasized that incompatibility relations between sentences are a necessary part of meaning as it is understood. We motivate this approach by showing that the standard normativist strategy in the literature, which is developed in terms of veridical reference that may swing free from the speaker’s understanding, violates the ought-implies-can principle, but ours does not. In addition, our approach is superior because, unlike the dominant approach, it can be extended from declarative sentences to non-representational uses of language. In this paper, however, we only formulate the argument for the base case that involves incompatibility relations between declarative sentences. The goal is not to derive norms from something that is not normative, but to explicate the distinctive type of normativity that is built into meaning as it is understood by language-users. The explication proceeds in two steps. (1) For any sentence s a speaker understands, there is another sentence s’ that is (and is understood by the speaker as) incompatible with s . (2) In virtue of understanding this incompatibility of meanings, she ought not to be committed to both s and s’ . This prohibition is not derived from instrumental practical reason, nor is it based on representational correctness, but its source is the incompatibility of meanings.

Purpose: Sentence diversity is a measure of early language development that has yet to be applied to individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The primary aim of this study was to identify whether children with ASD show change in sentence diversity over 6 months of treatment with Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Intervention (NDBI). The secondary aim was to examine possible predictors of changes in children's sentence diversity, including caregiver use of NDBI strategies, naturally occurring instances of caregiver \"Toy Talk,\" and child characteristics. Method: Fifty children with ASD (ages 2-4 years) and their caregivers, who were receiving NDBI, engaged in two 10-min video-recorded play interactions, 6 months apart. Child speech was transcribed and coded for sentence diversity. Caregiver input was transcribed and coded for naturally occurring \"Toy Talk.\" Zero-inflated negative binomial mixed models were used to explore predictors of change in child sentence diversity. Results: Children's sentence diversity improved over time. Changes in caregiver NDBI strategy use and caregiver baseline \"Toy Talk\" were significant predictors of changes in sentence diversity, as were baseline age, nonverbal ratio IQ, and child sex. Additionally, a significant interaction of caregiver baseline \"Toy Talk\" and change in caregiver NDBI strategies emerged; the effect of caregiver baseline \"Toy Talk\" on children's sentence diversity change was stronger when NDBI strategy use improved. Conclusions: Sentence diversity is a developmentally sensitive measure of language development in ASD. NDBI strategies that facilitate reciprocal social communication, combined with input composed of declarative sentences with noun or third-person pronoun subjects, may provide optimal support for children's sentence development.