Abstract
This study shows that the Turkish expression hani exhibits interesting properties for the study of the semantics and pragmatics interface, because, on the one hand, its function is merely pragmatic, but on the other hand, it is subject to the truth-conditional effect of other constituents at LF. This notwithstanding, studies on this expression are remarkably scarce. The only attempts to describe its properties are Erguvanlı-Taylan (Studies on Turkish and Turkic languages; proceedings of the ninth international conference on Turkish linguistics, 133–143, 2000), Akar et al. (Discourse meaning, 57–78, 2020), and Akar and Öztürk (Information-structural perspectives on discourse particles, 251–276, 2020). In the present study, we introduce the first formal semantic and pragmatic treatment of clauses containing hani. Unlike previous accounts, we claim that hani can have one of the following two major pragmatic functions: making salient a proposition in the Common Ground or challenging one in a past Common Ground, therefore requiring a Common Ground revision. Despite its variety of occurrences, we argue that hani has a uniform interpretation and provide a compositional analysis of the different construals that it is associated with. Furthermore, we show that a formally explicit and accurate characterization of hani clauses requires operating on indexical parameters, in particular the context time. Therefore, if our proposal is on the right track, hani clauses may provide indirect empirical evidence in favour of the existence of “monstrous” phenomena, adding to the accumulating cross-linguistic evidence in this domain (see Schlenker in Linguistics and Philosophy 26(1):29–120, 2003 and much work since then). The definition of monsters is intended as in Kaplan (Themes from Kaplan, 481–563, 1989).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Extending common practice on intensional operators, we call the sister of hani at LF its prejacent.
This paper leaves out a couple of other additional uses of hani, which we believe are not immediately related to the two main ones that we investigate here. First, in some very restricted occurrences, hani appears to mean nerede ‘where’. Secondly, it is often used as a “filler”, such as ‘I mean, um, er’ (see Özbek 1995, 1998, Furman and Özyürek 2007 for a discussion on “fillers” in Turkish). Finally, it is also used in child-directed speech to draw their attention to an object. Whether or not these uses can fall under a unified analysis is a question that we leave for future research.
In fact, a variant of (1a), that is also acceptable, is one where hani is unpronounced but ya is present. We take this case to be identical to (1a), where ya signals the presence of hani.
We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for bringing this point to our attention.
Hani clauses associated with the reminding function presented in (1a) have been reported to have a declarative intonation in the absence of ya, whereas they have been claimed to exhibit polar question intonation in the presence of ya (Akar and Öztürk 2020, Akar et al. 2020). Our intuitions concerning the intonation of hani clauses with ya is that it is similar to, but not identical to the intonation pattern found in yes/no questions. However, we do not undertake the task of determining their phonological properties and leave the comparison to future research.
A reviewer suggests to apply von Fintel’s (2004) ‘Hey, wait a minute test!’ to provide an additional argument for the presence of the presupposition of hani clauses. However, this test is not intended to test the existence of a presupposition, but to distinguish presuppositions from assertions in what is conveyed by a sentence, where these two might be confused.
We thank an anonymous reviewer who suggests a potential additional linguistic test to demonstrate the restriction that D-hani clauses occur with a follow-up utterance that picks up on their content. This finding is in support of our generalization in Sect. 2.2 that D-hani clauses are stage openers, always being followed by another utterance. Specifically, the reviewer suggests that the discourse particle Ee? ‘So?’ could be a felicitous reply to a D-hani clause uttered in isolation, further demonstrating this restriction of D-hani clauses. In addition, they point out that obvious utterances (part of CG), when occuring in isolation, legitimize the use of Ee?. Although we agree with the reviewer’s intuitions, we believe that the function of Ee? is more general. According to our informants, Ee? is felicitious when following any conversational pause that seems out of place, perhaps too long. In a sense, Ee? is a remark conveying that it is not yet the time for turn-taking in the conversation, asking the speaker for a continuation. Given this general function of Ee?, it makes sense that it would be a felicitous response to a D-hani clause uttered in isolation.
We use quotational embedding because hani clauses are otherwise non-embeddable.
We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting this test.
The comment “What kind of question is this?” can target the initial question, even when the speaker’s last utterance is a declarative sentence. This is shown in (i).
-
(i)
-
(i)
This assumption might be challenged as the intonational contour of these clauses is typical of Turkish wh-questions (Göksel et al. 2009). However, mismatches between form and meaning of this sort are predicted in a Y model theoretic view of grammar (Chomsky 1995). Mismatches are addressed in interfaces of the grammar: (i) by realizations rules in the morphology component (Halle and Marantz 1993) and (ii) by LF operations in the logical component (Heim and Kratzer 1998).
We show in Sect. 3 that the shift in the presupposition time has an effect on the time of the prejacent.
Due to the additional complexity of the verbal predicates in Q-hani clauses, our sample calculations involve sentences with non-verbal predicates, as an analysis of aspect is not crucial to the claims of this paper.
Besides the referential anaphoric view that we adopt above, there is another main view on the semantics of past where it introduces an existential quantification with contextual domain restrictions (see Ogihara 2007). Our proposal is compatible with the existential quantification view of the past tense proposed by Ogihara (2007) as well.
Given that the particle ya is optional, we do not include it in our structural representation. One might treat it as an identity function over propositions.
-mIş exhibits a curious behavior in Turkish. When it follows non-verbal predicates and aspectually marked verbs, it is an evidential marker, as shown in (47), whereas it marks anterior aspect when it precedes a tense morpheme. We remain agnostic as to whether the two meanings of -mIş should be related or are independent entries in the lexicon.
In Karttunen (1977), this is achieved in two steps: by the meaning of a Q morpheme, and the meaning of whether-or-not. We combined the two in one lexical item in the interest of simplicity.
The same also applies to the progressive marker in Turkish. It not only has a present time reference, but can also refer to a future time like the English progressive.
Notice that the example in (63) is different from (60), where the event and belief times overlap. Crucially, in (63), the belief time is prior to the event time.
One of the anonymous reviewers asks whether the examples arguing for null present and past tenses in the prejacent could also be analyzed to host a non-future tense as suggested in Matthewson for St’át’imcets. We believe that this would not work for Turkish for a number of different reasons. First, in St’át’imcets, predicates unmarked for tense in matrix clauses can have present or past temporal reference, but crucially cannot denote future events, which are overtly marked. Differently from St’át’imcets, past tense has to be marked in matrix clauses in Turkish, while the present tense is unmarked. Hence, one cannot talk about a two-way distinction involving future and non-future for Turkish matrix clauses. Second, it is not true that Q-hani clauses cannot have a future interpretation in the prejacent in the absence of future marking. This is in sharp contrast with St’át’imcets. Indeed, examples like (63b) and (62) show that the prejacent can have a future interpretation (relative to the belief time) without any overt marking.
As pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, a polar question without hani would also be odd in the same context as (71a). This supports our proposal that Q-hani clauses are indeed questions.
For the details relating to bias in NPQs, see the cited references above.
References
Akar, D., and B. Öztürk. 2020. The discourse marker hani in Turkish. In Information-structural perspectives on discourse particles, eds. P. Y. Modicom and O. Duplâtre, 251–276. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Akar, D., B. Öztürk, A. Göksel, and M. Kelepir. 2020. Common ground management and inner negation in one: The case of hani. In Discourse meaning, eds. D. Zeyrek and U. Özge, 57–78. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Aygen, G. 2007. Q-particle. Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi (Journal of Linguistics and Literature) 4(1): 1–30.
Chierchia, G., and S. McConnell-Ginet. 1990. Meaning and grammar: An introduction to semantics. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Coniglio, M. 2007. German modal particles in the IP-domain. Rivista di Grammatica Generativa 32: 3–37.
Deal, A. R. 2020. A theory of indexical shift: Meaning, grammar, and crosslinguistic variation. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Döring, S. 2016. Modal particles, discourse structure and common ground management: Theoretical and empirical aspects. PhD dissertation, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Döring, S., S. Repp, S. Featherston, R. Hörnig, S. Von Wietersheim, and S. Winkler. 2019. The modal particles ja and doch and their interaction with discourse structure: Corpus and experimental evidence. In Experiments in focus: Information structure and semantic processing, eds. S. Featherston, R. Hörnig, S. von Wietersheim, and S. Winkler, 17–55.
Eckardt, R. 2016. Questions on the table. Unpublished manuscript. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304304651_Questions_on_the_Table.
Egg, M., and M. Zimmermann. 2012. Stressed out! Accented discourse particles: The case of ‘doch’. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 16, eds. A. Aguilar Guevara, A. Chernilovskaya, and R. Nouwen, 225–238.
Erguvanlı-Taylan, E. 2000. Semi-grammaticalised modality in Turkish. In Studies on Turkish and Turkic languages; proceedings of the ninth international conference on Turkish linguistics, eds. A. Göksel and C. Kerslake, 133–143.
Farkas, D. F., and K. B. Bruce. 2009. On reacting to assertions and polar questions. Journal of Semantics 27(1): 81–118. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffp010.
von Fintel, K. 2004. Would you believe it? The king of France is back! (Presuppositions and truth-value intuitions). In Descriptions and beyond, eds. A. Bezuidenhout and M. Reimer, 315–341. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Furman, R., and A. Özyürek. 2007. Development of interactional discourse markers: Insights from Turkish children’s and adults’ oral narratives. Journal of Pragmatics 39(10): 1742–1757.
Gajewski, J. 2002a. L-analyticity and natural language. Unpublished manuscript. https://jon-gajewski.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1784/2016/08/analytic.pdf.
Gajewski, J. 2002b. L-triviality and grammar. Unpublished manuscript. https://jon-gajewski.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1784/2016/08/Logic.pdf.
Gazdar, G. 1979. Pragmatics, implicature, presuposition and logical form. Critica 12(35).
Göksel, A., M. Kelepir, and A. Üntak-Tarhan. 2009. Decomposition of question intonation: The structure of response seeking utterances. In Phonological domains, eds. J. Grijzenhout and B. Kabak, 249–282. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Grice, H. P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Speech acts, eds. P. Cole and J. L. Morgan, 41–58. Leiden: Brill.
Groenendijk, J. 1999. The logic of interrogation: Classical version. In Semantics and linguistic theory 9, eds. T. Matthews and D. Strolovitch, 109–126.
Groenendijk, J., and M. Stokhof. 1984. Studies on the semantics of questions and the pragmatics of answers. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.
Gutzmann, D. 2009. Hybrid semantics for modal particles. Sprache und Datenverarbeitung 33(1–2): 45–59.
Gutzmann, D. 2013. Expressives and beyond: An introduction to varieties of conventional non-truth-conditional meaning. In Beyond expressives: Explorations in use-conditional meaning, Leiden: Brill.
Halle, M., and A. Marantz. 1993. Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In The view from building 20, MIT working papers in linguistics, 111–176. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Heim, I. 1991. Artikel und definitheit. Temantik: ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung 5(6): 487–535.
Heim, I. 1994. Comments on Abusch’s theory of tense. In Ellipsis, tense and questions, 143–170.
Heim, I., and A. Kratzer. 1998. Semantics in generative grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ippolito, M. 2003. Presuppositions and implicatures in counterfactuals. Natural Language Semantics 11(2): 145–186.
Kamali, B., and M. Krifka. 2020. Focus and contrastive topic in questions and answers, with particular reference to Turkish. Theoretical Linguistics 46(1–2): 1–71.
Kaplan, D. 1989. Demonstratives: An essay on the semantics, logic, metaphysics and epistemology of demonstratives and other indexicals. In Themes from Kaplan, eds. J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein, 481–563. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Karagjosova, E. 2004. The meaning and function of German modal particles. Unpublished manuscript.
Karttunen, L. 1977. Syntax and semantics of questions. Linguistics & Philosophy 1: 3–44.
Kratzer, A. 1995. Stage-level and individual-level predicates. In The generic book, eds. G. N. Carlson and F. J. Pelletier, 125–175. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kratzer, A. 1999. Beyond ouch and oops: How descriptive and expressive meaning interact. In Handout for Cornell conference on theories of context dependency. https://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/WEwNGUyO/Beyond%20%22Ouch%22%20and%20%22Oops%22.pdf.
Kratzer, A. 2004. Interpreting focus: Presupposed or expressive meanings? A comment on Geurts and van der Sandt. Theoretical Linguistics 30(1): 123–136. https://doi.org/10.1515/thli.2004.002.
Krifka, M. 2001. Quantifying into question acts. Natural Language Semantics 9: 1–40.
Krifka, M. 2011. Questions. In Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning, eds. K. von Heusinger, C. Maienborn, and P. Portner, 1742–1785. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Krifka, M. 2015. Bias in commitment space semantics: Declarative questions, negated questions, and question tags. In Semantics and linguistic theory 25, 328–345.
Krifka, M. 2017. Negated polarity questions as denegations of assertions. In Contrastiveness in information structure, alternatives and scalar implicatures, eds. S. D’Antonio, M. Moroney, and C. R. Little, 359–398. New York: Springer.
Ladd, D. R. 1981. A first look at the semantics and pragmatics of negative questions and tag questions. In Proceedings of the Chicago linguistics society 17, eds. R. A. Hendrick, C. S. Masek, and M. F. Miller, 164–171.
Matthewson, L. 2006. Temporal semantics in a superficially tenseless language. Linguistics and Philosophy 29: 673–713.
Musan, R. 1997. Tense, predicates, and lifetime effects. Natural Language Semantics 5(3): 271–301.
Ogihara, T. 2007. Tense and aspect in truth-conditional semantics. Lingua 117(2): 392–418.
Özbek, N. 1995. Discourse markers in Turkish and English: A comparative study. PhD dissertation, University of Nottingham.
Özbek, N. 1998. Türkçede söylem belirleyicileri. Dilbilim Araştırmaları Dergisi 9: 37–47.
Özyıldız, D. 2015. Move to mI, but only if you can. In Workshop on altaic formal linguistics 11, 4–6.
Partee, D. 1973. Some structural analogies between tenses and pronouns in English. The Journal of Philosophy 70(18): 601–609.
Reese, B. 2005. Negative polar interrogatives and bias. In New frontiers in artificial intelligence: Joint JSAI 2005 workshop post-proceedings, eds. T. Washio et al., 85–92.
Rojas-Esponda, T. 2014. A QUD account of German ‘doch’. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 18, eds. U. Etxeberria, A. Fălăuş, A. Irurtzun, and B. Leferman, 359–376.
Romero, M., and C. Han. 2004. On negative yes/no questions. Linguistics and Philosophy 27(5): 609–658.
Santorio, P. 2010. Modals are monsters: On indexical shift in English. In Semantics and linguistic theory 20, eds. N. Li and D. Lutz, 289–308.
Sauerland, U. 2007. Beyond unpluggability. Theoretical Linguistics 33(2): 231–236. https://doi.org/10.1515/TL.2007.016.
Schlenker, P. 2003. A plea for monsters. Linguistics and Philosophy 26(1): 29–120.
Schlenker, P. 2007. Expressive presuppositions. Theoretical Linguistics 33(2): 237–245. https://doi.org/10.1515/TL.2007.017.
Stalnaker, R. 1977. Pragmatic presuppositions. In Proceedings of the Texas conference on per˜ formatives, presuppositions, and implicatures, eds. M. K. Munitz and P. Unger, 135–148. Arlington: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Stalnaker, R. 1978. Assertion. In Pragmatics, ed. P. Cole, 315–332. Leiden: Brill.
Stalnaker, R. 1999. Context and content: Essays on intentionality in speech and thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Stalnaker, R. 2002. Common ground. Linguistics and Philosophy 25(5/6): 701–721.
Van Rooy, R., and M. Safarova. 2003. On polar questions. In Semantics and linguistic theory 13, 292–309.
Zimmermann, M. 2012. Discourse particles. In Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning, eds. K. von Heusinger, C. Maienborn, and P. Portner, 2012–2038. Berlin: de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110255072.2012.
Acknowledgements
For very valuable feedback, we thank the two NALS anonymous reviewers and the editors. We are also grateful to Didar Akar, İsa Kerem Bayırlı, Balkız Öztürk, Nilüfer Şener and the audiences of the 8th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic and of the Jezik and Linguistics Colloquium at the University of Nova Gorica for their constructive comments. All remaining errors are ours.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing Interests
The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Dikmen, F., Guerzoni, E. & Demirok, Ö. When tense shifts presuppositions: hani and monstrous semantics. Nat Lang Semantics 32, 231–268 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-023-09215-y
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-023-09215-y