25 February 2020, EXPRESS seminar, Manfred Krifka

It is commonly assumed that assertions can be weakened or strengthened. In this talk I will identify two linguistic strategies that lead to the impression of changing assertoric strength and that are arguably embodied in the structure of assertive clauses. I will argue for a specific syntactic implementation, postulating a “Commitment Phrase” that takes a “Judgement Phrase” as a complement, which can house different linguistic modifiers or head features. I will show that a semantic interpretation format in which judgement and commitment operators are just treated as non-at-issue meanings on a separate level of semantic interpretation is not sufficient and argue for a theory in which those operators are conceived as means to put the core proposition into the common ground.