Open AccessResponse particles as propositional anaphors
Author(s) -
Manfred Krifka
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
proceedings from semantics and linguistic theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2163-5951
pISSN - 2163-5943
DOI - 10.3765/salt.v0i0.2676
Subject(s) - antecedent (behavioral psychology) , linguistics , german , propositional formula , propositional variable , computer science , psychology , philosophy , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , social psychology , intermediate logic , description logic
The paper explains response particles like yes and no as anaphoric elements that pick up propositional discourse referents that are introduced by preceding sentences. It is argued that negated antecedent clauses introduce two propositional discourse referents, which results in ambiguities of answers that is partly resolved by pragmatic optimization. The paper also discusses response particles like okay, right and uh-huh and uh-uh, and German ja, nein and doch.