Negotiating truth and relevance: A new typology of English rising declaratives

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.