This course examines key linguistic phenomena that have shaped commitment-based dynamic pragmatic models and explores how such models account for speech acts that can be said to express a call on the addressee, e.g., those containing tag questions, utterance-final discourse markers, or vocatives.

Dynamic models of discourse treat communication as a coordinated activity in which interlocutors undertake, negotiate, and influence public commitments—both doxastic and practical—through the discourse moves they perform. The simplest moves are utterances where a single morphosyntactic element, such as clause type  (declarative, interrogative, imperative), an explicit performative verb, or a response particle functions as the primary marker of illocutionary force, signaling a speaker’s commitment status.

Articulated strategies in which multiple linguistic elements contribute distinct but integrated components of speech act structure have also been investigated, mostly in the context of biased (or non-canonical) questions. These complex discourse strategies are analyzed in different ways, e.g. as encoding degrees of speaker credence in a proposition or as involving conjoined/disjoined speech acts or as effecting complex changes to the scoreboard that trigger pragmatic reasoning.

We will explore the view that such strategies, which anticipate the addressee’s commitments or reactions, express the speaker’s preferences as to how the conversational state evolves.

Using data primarily from English and Indo-Aryan languages, the course aims to introduce students to the theoretical grounding, analytical methods, and formal tools needed to study commitment-influencing linguistic strategies across languages. These investigations bear on broader questions in semantics and pragmatics about the marking of speech acts, the fine-grained interactionally-oriented organization of utterances, and how language facilitates the negotiation of speaker and addressee commitments.