The “standard” view of sentence types since Sadock & Zwicky (1976) is that they occur in a handful of broad flavors, characterized by a dedicated syntactic form: declarative, interrogative, imperative, and (sometimes) exclamative. But the sort of semantics a sentence is assigned is typically motivated by assumptions about the discourse function of uttering sentences of that type: declaratives are typically used to make assertions, so they have propositional semantics; interrogatives are typically used to ask questions, so they have semantics which encode alternatives.

However, the link from semantics to discourse function is much messier than that picture may suggest. Some sentences have declarative syntax but seem to ask questions (You have a pet wombat?), other have interrogative syntax but don’t ask genuine questions (Is the Pope Catholic?), and other sentences mix sentence types in one package (Stop making noise or I’ll call the cops!). So what is the right semantics for sentences, and what factors determine how these sentences are interpreted in context? This course will explore some historical and current issues in the mapping between sentence meaning and speech acts, focusing in particular on cases where a neat mapping seems to break down, including topics like rising declaratives, rhetorical questions, tag questions, and mixed-type conjuncitons.

This course is complementary to the week 2 course “What embedded sentences do”; both courses may be followed or a student can pick just one.