Towards a formal semantics for interjective what

Authors

  • Jesse A Harris Pomona College

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v23i0.2682

Keywords:

Discourse particles, questions, approximation, prosody, corpus pragmatics.

Abstract

Discourse particles and interjectives allow a speaker to signal how information presented in an utterance relates to her epistemic or emotive state. I present a semantics for one such interjective: the English particle what, providing evidence that it carries multiple discourse functions, and proposing that these distinct uses are best captured by their relation to the central discourse topic.

Author Biography

  • Jesse A Harris, Pomona College
    Assistant Professor of Linguistics & Cognitive Science

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Published

2013-08-24

Issue

Proceedings of SALT 23

Section

Articles

License

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.