Syntax & Semantics Circle
University of California, Santa Cruz
Winter 2019
January 23
Margaret Kroll and Tom Roberts (UC Santa Cruz): “I hold these truths to be self-evident: Of course as a marker of uncontroversiality”
The English discourse particle of course is one of a cross-linguistic class of discourse particles which signal that a proposition is obvious or 'uncontroversial':
(1) A: Did Maude make her famous kumquat strudel for the potluck?
B: Of course she did.
B's response in (1) is naturally understood to indicate both that B is highly committed to the proposition that Maude made strudel, and that A too should have known that proposition. The better-studied similar German particle ja has been argued to lexically encode both of these inferences by reflecting uncontroversiality as a property that holds of p for all participants in a discourse (Grosz 2010, Kaufmann & Kaufmann 2012, a.o.).
We argue that a more nuanced notion of uncontroversiality, crucially relativized it to a particular individual, is necessary to capture the behavior of of course. Concretely, we propose that a proposition p is uncontroversial for a particular speaker if they believe it to be significantly more likely than its focus alternatives. The contribution of of course is to presuppose that a proposition p is uncontroversial for the speaker, but the inference of presumed uncontroversiality for the addressee is derived pragmatically. We demonstrate that this analysis uniformly captures a variety of superficially disparate uses of of course as well as explaining how it is distinct from ja.