1887
Volume 33, Issue 1
  • ISSN 0929-7332
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9919

Abstract

Given a set of alternatives, a speaker can explicitly admit ignorance about which of them hold true. The (in)felicity of such admission-of-ignorance moves immediately following disjunctions and conjunctions follows from the semantics of and However, semantics alone turns out to be insufficient in cases when the disjunction/conjunction and the admission-of-ignorance move are separated by additional conversational moves of acceptance, objection, or removal of an existing assertion. I argue that these patterns follow if admission-of-ignorance are associated to a speech act operator admit whose input is restricted to propositions that the current speaker is publicly committed to at the current conversational stage.

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2016-12-14
2024-12-11
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): alternatives; conjunction; discourse; disjunction
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