Negotiating truth and relevance: A new typology of English rising declaratives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rising declaratives have been a prolific test bed for investigating the contribution of sentence-final intonation to the interpretation of assertive speech acts. In the past, this contribution has almost exclusively been described as a qualification of the speaker's commitment to the truth of the proposition. In this paper, I argue that we can only incorporate the full variation in uses of English rising declaratives if we expand conversational negotiations to include negotiations of relevance. Returning to the established insight that qualified commitment grounds in the avoidance of the risk of losing face, I propose that speakers not only avoid commitment if uncertain about propositional truth; they also avoid it if the relation to the question under discussion is unclear. In addition to accounting for the traditional divide between inquisitive and assertive uses of rising declaratives, the proposed expansion can also incorporate incredulous and narrative uses, which are void of any uncertainty and still come with a sentence-final rise. The latter seeks to resolve an epistemic clash; the former suspends the negotiation to add further information pertaining to the question under discussion. The proposed typology rests on the analysis of rising declaratives elicited in a Map Task study. To illustrate the variation in use conventions, I draw on the analogy of the negotiation table and frame the notion of relevance by situating this negotiation in the question-under-discussion framework. • Rising declaratives are used to negotiate the truth or relevance of a proposition. • A lack of speaker commitment can root in uncertainty about truth or relevance. • Steep rises do not equal speaker uncertainty. • Shallow rises suspend the conversational negotiation. • Metalinguistic issues can be incorporated within a QUD analysis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".