Conversational backoff
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v20i0.2550Keywords:
questions, responses, disagreement, discourse, dynamics, conditionals.Abstract
I explore and analyze a phenomenon ("conversational backoff") where, instead of accepting an assertion in the normal way, a speaker challenges its exhaustiveness, but not its content. The result is that speakers publicly back off of the exhaustivity of the claim. These challenges are typically triggered by special questions of a conditional type, and I focus in particular on the case of "what if" questions, developing a detailed analysis of their semantics and dynamics.Downloads
Published
2010-08-14
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Articles appearing in SALT are published under an author agreement with the Linguistic Society of America and are made available to readers under a Creative Commons Attribution License.