Discourse adjectives Introduction

This chapter introduces and provides a semantic analysis of discourse adjectives, a natural class of predicates whose members include apparent, evident, clear, and obvious in their use as propositional modifiers in sentences such as those in (1).

Discourse adjectives are a predicate type whose meaning is not typical of expressions in natural language. The main claim made is that discourse adjectives provide interlocutors with a way to talk about their conversation rather than their world. To illustrate, compare the sentences in (2).

Sentence (2a) is an informative sentence – it provides information about the world. Specifically, (2a) specifies that Briscoe has the property of being a detective. In contrast, sentence (2b) does not provide new information about whether or not Briscoe is a detective. Instead, the new information provided is information about the discourse itself. An utterance of (2b) makes a claim about the interlocutors’ beliefs about the proposition expressed by Briscoe is a detective – specifically, that in the current discourse situation there is sufficient evidence to conclude that Briscoe is a detective, at least to a minimum, vague standard of clarity.

The idea presented is that discourse adjectives do not add new information to the common ground in the conventional manner (Stalnaker 1978: 325; van der Sandt 1992: 367, etc.); they are an example of a predicate whose semantics carries no new descriptive content. Their function is to allow speakers to synchronize their common ground. The key elements of this analysis are an understanding of vagueness, factivity, and the interpretation of the sometimes implicit experiencer of a discourse adjective. Additionally, to represent the synchronizing effect of utterances with discourse adjectives, the analysis makes crucial use of a framework that leverages a representation of the speaker’s and Addressee’s distinct information states.

This chapter will provide a complete analysis of the semantics of sentence (2b). It is structured as follows. First, support for the claim that discourse adjectives are a natural class is provided by showing that they share a unique syntactic distribution. The syntactic distribution of discourse adjectives is contrasted with that of two other types of proposition-modifying predicates, raising adjectives and what I call attitude adjectives, which correspond in large part to emotive factive predicates (Kiparsky and Kiparsky 1971). The observation is made that discourse adjectives often give the appearance of being factive predicates, even though they ultimately fail standard diagnostics for factivity. The heart of the chapter is a case study of the semantics of clear which includes a discussion of experiencers, beliefs, and vagueness. As this case study modifies the framework proposed by Gunlogson (2001), the final section is a brief discussion of the consequences for this model.