Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Sentences change in conversation. They can “shrink” to fragments. But they can also “grow” to include material that can only be interpreted in the context of a conversation. For example, Canadian eh as in “I have a new dog, eh?” is used to ask the addressee (A) for confirmation that s/he knows that the proposition expressed in the utterance (p) is true. Hence, eh is A-oriented in at least two ways:

i)              … the speaker (S) indicates that s/he believes that – but is not sure if – A knows that p and

ii)             … S requests a response from A and hence marks the end of his/her turn

Based on the empirical properties of confirmationals (such as eh) as well as response markers across a number of unrelated languages, I argue that the human language faculty includes a Conversation Competence.  That is, I argue that our conceptualization of Universal Grammar (UG) has to include a layer of structure that hosts units of language dedicated to expressing S’s attitude towards p; S’s assessment of A’s attitude towards p. I refer to this layer as the grounding layer. In addition, there is another layer, which is dedicated to expressing what S wants A to do with the utterance. I refer to this as the response layer. I suggest that conceptualizing the left periphery in terms of the grounding and response layer is empirically more adequate than postulating a Speech Act Phrase or a dedicated ForcePhrase. 

The analysis is couched within the Universal Spine Hypothesis (Wiltschko 2014) which allows for an exploration of the association of sound and meaning to an abstract functional spine.