Open AccessTowards a formal semantics for interjective ‘what’
Author(s) -
Jesse Harris
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.v0i0.2682
Subject(s) - utterance , emotive , semantics (computer science) , relation (database) , computer science , formal semantics (linguistics) , linguistics , speech act , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , epistemology , philosophy , programming language , database
Discourse particles and interjectives allow a speaker to signal how information presented in an utterance relates to her epistemic or emotive state. I present a semantics for one such interjective: the English particle what, providing evidence that it carries multiple discourse functions, and proposing that these distinct uses are best captured by their relation to the central discourse topic.