Belgian Journal of Linguistics - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2008

This volume brings together thoroughly reworked versions of a selection of papers presented at the conference The Notion of Commitment in Linguistics, held at the University of Antwerp in January 2007. It is the companion volume to a collection of essays in French to be published in Langue Française and devoted to La notion de prise en charge. Commitment is a close counterpart toprise en charge, and two contributors, Celle and Lansari, use it essentially as a translation of the French term. However, commitment and its verbal cognates (to commit NP to and to be committed to) do not cover the exact same range of meanings as prise en charge. For a thorough assessment of the French term, we refer readers to the introduction to the Langue Française volume. In the present article, we focus entirely on commitment.The term is widely used in at least three major areas of linguistic enquiry:1 studies on illocutionary acts, studies on modality and evidentiality, and the formal modelling of dialogue/argumentation. In spite of its frequent use, the notion has rarely been theorised and has never been the subject of a monograph or a specialised reader. In keeping with this is the fact that none of the many dictionaries and encyclopaedias of linguistics or philosophy that we have consulted devotes a separate entry to it.Section 1 of this introduction briefly reviews what commitment means in the three fields just mentioned. Now and then, with respect to a particular issue, pointers are given to which articles in this collection have something to say about the issue. In section 2, we take a lexical and syntactic look at the ways in which the contributors to the present volume use the term. In section 3, we outline each of the contributions, with a focus on the role that commitment plays in them.

This paper presents a semantic treatment of the modal uses of the future tense and the conditional in French and a comparison with their English translations. It is argued that the future and the conditional convey the speaker’s commitment and non-commitment respectively, regardless of how information has been obtained and irrespective of whether this information has been verified or not. Commitment and non-commitment are defined as modes of enunciation depending on how the speaker treats and possibly eliminates representations other than her own representation. The modal meaning of the uses under discussion is shown to derive from a mode of mixed enunciation, which either modulates assertion in the case of commitment or suspends it in the case of noncommitment. In English, this difference is not grammaticalised in the verb system. For example, the modal must may be regarded as an equivalent for both the epistemic conditional and the modal future.

This paper proposes an alternative cognitive account of the notion of speaker commitment in terms of speaker involvement and processing. The focus will be on the role of the speaker as conceptualizer. Invoking conceptualizer-related processing instead of speaker commitment has the advantage of avoiding reliance on non-speakerrelated dimensions to determine degrees of speaker commitment for introducing some propositional content. Our theoretical claim is based on two case studies from Spanish. First, canonical direct que ‘that’-clauses and oblique de que ‘of that’-clauses present an occasional switch to the alternate oblique and non-oblique construction, known as dequeísmo and queísmo, respectively. Dequeísmo has hitherto been related to notions such as doubt, hearsay, or distancing, i.e., to weak speaker commitment. Context analysis, however, shows that this approach is descriptively inadequate and that the phenomenon can best be accounted for in terms of speaker involvement: the speaker-conceptualizer is highly involved in selective information retrieval. Queísmo, by contrast, minimizes stage-managing, thus yielding low speaker involvement. In both cases, the relative strength of the speaker’s commitment is to be inferred on other grounds.Second, the Spanish modals poder, deber and tener que have been described in terms of weak, intermediate and strong speaker commitment. Yet, it will be shown that speaker involvement in downplaying the force structure decreases from poder to tener que. The more the deontic background can be subjectified the more the speaker is involved in the subjective construal. Here, weak commitment thus correlates with strong speaker involvement, and vice versa.

This article reports on the results of a corpus-based investigation of the functions of the “cognition verb + que-clause” complementation structure in Spanish. We will show that the interpretation of this pattern depends on the choice between subject and speaker perspective, and on the use made of both perspectives in descriptive and argumentative contexts. These two axes, perspective and use, determine the involvement of the speaker in the propositional content of the complement clause. Various configurations of speaker involvement can thus be identified.

In linguistics, the notion of commitment is associated with a range of other notions, such as belief (Dendale & Coltier 2005: 127), will (Palmer 1998: 102) and responsibility (Nølke et al. 2004: 44). Belief and will are examples of psychological states the speaker has towards a certain proposition – they are also known as propositional attitudes – while responsibility has to do with the speaker being the source of a certain proposition. The aim of this article is to examine the relation between these different notions. I will do this by analysing the use of deontic sentences in different types of legal and administrative texts in Dutch.The article is organised as follows. In section 1, I will provide some background on deontic sentences (§1.1), on legal and administrative discourse (§1.2) and on the notion of commitment (§1.3). In section 2, the notion of commitment will be applied to deontic sentences, both in terms of responsibility (§2.1) and propositional attitudes (§2.2).

This paper addresses certain restrictions on the use of declaratives as questions in English. Declaratives are taken to express commitment by the speaker, even in a questioning use. The analysis traces the restrictions to two distinct contextual factors: (i) a general principle requiring that a commitment have a recognized source, i.e., a discourse agent who plausibly has independent evidence supporting the content committed to; (ii) specific to a questioning interpretation, the need for the context to support the inference that the speaker’s commitment depends upon the addressee’s anticipated confirmation. Rising intonation contributes a very general element of meaning, indicating that the utterance it marks is contingent upon some discourse condition obtaining; the specific conditions required for a questioning interpretation instantiate one such type of contingency. The proposals are modeled via elaboration of standard contextual structures in a possible-worlds framework.

This paper argues that the notion of commitment can clarify the distinction between two Japanese concessive connectives -noni and -kedo: the former expresses a high degree and the latter a relatively low degree of speaker commitment to an assumption underlying the concessive meaning. This difference in meaning supports a satisfactory account of some syntactic differences between the two connectives. It is also shown that the difference in the degree of commitment to an assumption is attested in the lexical contrast of the concessive meanings of Russian connectives a and no. These observations, along with some examples of commitment to a presupposition or speech act, show that the notion of commitment is applicable not only to the explicit part of an utterance (statement or propositional content) but also to implicit aspects of meaning.

This paper deals with the two kinds of commitment associated with assertive speech acts: the commitment to having justifications for the propositional content and the commitment to the truth of this content. It is argued that the former kind of commitment boils down to the monotonic commitment to the truth of the propositional content, and can be cancelled. The latter, by contrast, is non-monotonic, and is associated with all assertive speech acts, even those containing a reservation marker. These facts can be explained if one (a) endorses the ‘Direct Perception’ view, according to which every piece of communicated information goes, by default, into the hearer’s ‘belief box’; (b) defines the success of assertive speech acts in terms of the possibility to update the common ground with their propositional content.

This paper aims at reexamining the notion of commitment through a case study: the comparison of the periphrases be going to and aller + inf. in contemporary English and French in a variety of texts and syntactic environments. Three cases are examined: the occurrence of the two periphrases in conditional si / if-clauses, their use in narratives and their predictive use in news texts. This study is based on authentic translated data drawn from literary and journalistic texts and relies on an enunciative definition of commitment: commitment is defined as a ‘direct mode of enunciation’ where the speaker is the subjective origin validating or contemplating the future validation of the propositional content. The three cases under scrutiny show that be going to and aller + inf. are not strictly equivalent and I argue that the absence of equivalence can be linked to the fact that they behave differently as far as commitment is concerned.

This paper proposes a cognitive-pragmatic alternative to the traditional, speech-acttheoretic, account of the notion of commitment. The perspective adopted here questions the relevance of addressing actual commitment as a speaker category and shifts the focus of the discussion from properties of speaker commitment to processes ofcommitment attribution. Using a relevance-theoretic framework, it will be suggested that inferring commitment in ordinary, cooperative, communication is part of the processes by which hearers derive speaker meaning, and that the degree of reliability that a hearer may expect to attain in attributing commitment to a speaker correlates with the degree of certainty associated to the derivation of explicatures and implicatures from an utterance.

Commitment should be understood as a dynamic and discursive category. This raises some important questions for the theory of grammar: to what extent do languages encode the dynamic and discursive aspects of commitment? At what level of analysis does this encoding take place? Which markers encode these aspects? In order to answer some of these questions two Italian adverbs expressing strong commitment are analyzed: certamente and sicuramente. Their distribution at the level of macro-syntactic discourse configurations is studied and contrasted. It emerges that the two adverbs select different distributional contexts. Certamente occurs in contexts that reveal its nature as a polyphonic trigger; sicuramente occurs in contexts that reveal its nature as a trigger of a paradigm of strictly internal alternative judgments. The encoding of the more discursive and dynamic aspects of commitment takes place, at least in this case, not at the morphological or at the syntactic level, but at the discourse level. Indeed, it is conveyed by the constructional composition of the lexical meaning of the two adverbs with the meaning of the discourse structures with which they are associated.

Gunlogson (2007) claims that (i) declaratives used as questions express a propositional commitment just as normal assertions do, but that (ii) this commitment is not attributed to the speaker’s but to the addressee’s commitment-set. Thus, Gunlogson (2007) interprets all declarative questions as “attributive” utterance types involving a commitment-shift from speaker to addressee. By contrast, I will argue that not all declarative questions involve the suggested commitment-shift. I will distinguish two types of declarative questions, (i) echo questions (with declarative sentence type) and (ii) confirmative questions. Whereas echo questions leave the speaker’s commitment-set untouched, confirmative questions involve speaker-commitment. Moreover, echo questions and confirmative questions behave very differently with respect to intonation patterns (rising versus falling), the type of sentence they instantiate and certain meta-linguistic operations.