We model the conventional meaning of utterances that combine two distinct clause types: a (positive) declarative or imperative (in rare cases, interrogative) anchor and a (negative) interrogative tag, such as won’t you?. We argue that such utterances express a single speech act, and in fact, a single conventional update of the conversational scoreboard. The proposed model of this effect is a straightforward extension of prior proposals for the semantics of declaratives, imperatives, and preposed-negation interrogatives. Ours is the first unified account (...) of these phenomena that addresses the sentential force of these utterances and outlines how the speech act effects arise from the scoreboard update and contextual factors. We enrich the conversational scoreboard, interpreted as a model of sentential force, to include graded commitments and non-at-issue meanings. A consequence of our model is that modified utterances can create “blended” speech acts which share some, but not all, properties with the unmodified utterances. The proposal has implications for models of other utterance modifiers, as well as for negative interrogatives and negation in general, and for imperative/jussive constructions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The BiRCh Project (The Corpus of Bilingual Russian Child Speech) involves collecting a longitudinal audio corpus of Russian spoken by children and their families in Russia, Ukraine, Germany, the U.S., and Canada. We are building a large-scale corpus based on a subset of this data, the “Parsed and Audio-aligned Corpus of Bilingual Russian Child and Child-directed Speech (BiRCh)” with two basic components: (1) 1-million-word transcripts which are time-aligned with the audio speech signal and fully textsearchable, and (2) a 500K-word (...) morphologically annotated and parsed portion of the transcripts, also audio-aligned. We are using this corpus to investigate various phenomena in the linguistic input and the developmental trajectory of heritage bilinguals, e.g., case, gender, passives, impersonals, politeness markers, disfluencies, and discourse markers. This article focuses on the challenges and solutions of the BiRCh development and the implications for research on the richly annotated data provided by the corpus. (shrink)

RESUMO O projeto BiRCh (The Corpus of Bilingual Russian Child Speech, Corpus de fala de crianças bilíngues em russo) envolve a construção de um corpus longitudinal composto de gravações de fala em russo produzida por crianças e suas famílias na Rússia, Ucrânia, Alemanha, EUA e Canadá. Estamos construindo um corpus de larga escala com base no conjunto dessas gravações, o ‘Parsed and Audio-aligned Corpus of Bilingual Russian Child and Child-directed Speech (BiRCh)’, com os dois componentes básicos: (1) as transcrições de (...) um milhão de palavras alinhadas com os arquivos de áudio, em que pode ser realizada a busca textual, e (2) as transcrições de 500 mil palavras anotadas morfologicamente e analisadas sintaticamente, também alinhadas com os arquivos de áudio. Estamos utilizando o corpus para investigar os diversos fenômenos no input linguístico e na trajetória do desenvolvimento de falantes de herança, tais como o uso de caso, gênero, construções passivas e impessoais, marcadores de polidez, disfluências e marcadores discursivos. Este artigo enfoca os desafios e soluções no processo da construção do BiRCh e as implicações para a pesquisa com base nos dados detalhadamente anotados fornecidos pelo corpus. (shrink)