Inquisitive Semantics

What is inquisitive semantics?

Inquisitive semantics is a framework for the formal analysis of information exchange. It is based on a notion of semantic content which, unlike the traditional truth-conditional notion, captures both informative and inquisitive aspects of meaning. It allows for a unified analysis of statements and questions, as well as linguistic elements that interact with both statements and questions, such as modals, quantifiers, connectives, and discourse particles.

A new perspective on meaning

In inquisitive semantics, an utterance is intuitively seen as a proposal to update the already established information in one or more ways. Statements propose a single update. Questions propose two or more alternative updates. This makes questions inquisitive: they invite a response from the addressee that establishes at least one of the proposed alternative updates.

A new perspective on logic

The way in which inquisitive semantics enriches the notion of meaning changes our perspective on logic as well. Besides the classical notion of logical entailment, the semantics also gives rise to a new notion of inquisitive entailment and a more general treatment of logical operators such as connectives (e.g. and, or, if, not), quantifiers (e.g., some, all), and modal operators (e.g., must, may, know, believe, wonder).

A new perspective on pragmatics

The way in which inquisitive semantics enriches the notion of meaning also changes our perspective on pragmatics. The main objective of pragmatics is to explain aspects of interpretation that are not directly dictated by semantic content in terms of general features of rational human behaviour. Since inquisitive semantics offers a richer notion of semantic content, pragmatics becomes richer as well. Traditional Gricean pragmatics consists exclusively of speaker-oriented rules for providing information. Inquisitive pragmatics has the same basic objective, but is more general: it is both speaker- and hearer-oriented, and specifies rules for exchanging information rather than just providing information. This makes it possible to derive a wider range of implicatures, in particular ones that arise from inquisitiveness.

News [[ View all news ]]

22 Jun '22 The paper Coherence in inquisitive first-order logic by Ivano Ciardelli and Gianluca Grilletti has appeared in the Annals of Pure and Applied Logic.

19 Jun '22 The paper Learnability and constraints on the semantics of clause-embedding predicates by Mora Maldonado, Jennifer Culbertson and Wataru Uegaki has appeared in the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

24 May '22 The paper On the interpretation and distribution of embedded main clause syntax: new perspectives on complex discourse moves by Kajsa Djärv has appeared in Glossa.

9 May '22 The paper The Syntactic Encoding of Conventional Implicatures in Sicilian Polar Questions by Silvio Cruschina and Valentina Bianchi has appeared in Probus.

26 Apr '22 Deniz Özyıldız, Ciyang Qing, Floris Roelofsen, Maribel Romero, and Wataru Uegaki present their work on Cross-linguistic patterns in the selectional restrictions of preferential predicates at the GLOW workshop on typology and semantics.

11 Apr '22 Patrick Elliott discusses recent work on dynamic inquisitive semantics at Semantics seminar at MIT.

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