The speech event and its content

Hacquard adopts the Speech Act Phrase of Speas and Tenny, whose head introduces a speech event e* and encodes illocutionary force, and adds that the speech event has content CON(e*): the speaker's beliefs for a declarative, the addressee's To-Do List for an imperative. A modal bound by e* reads CON(e*) as its conversational background, so the event rather than a lexical ambiguity supplies the modal's flavor. Here CON(e*) enters the discourse context through the update of the force, which changes the speaker's context set for a declarative and the addressee's ordering for an imperative, and the licensed modal and flavor are read off the component the force updates, in the states of the participants it updates.

Main definitions

• Mood.SpeechEvent: a force together with CON(e*).
• Mood.SpeechEvent.toContext, Mood.SpeechEvent.modal: the induced discourse context and its modal.
• Discourse.SpeechAct.Force.primaryFlavor: Hacquard's flavor of a speech act, read off its component.

Implementation notes

• Hacquard's four speech acts are declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives and quotatives, after Tenny and Speas; Speas and Tenny 2003 derive the subjunctive in place of the quotative, whose status they leave open. Discourse.SpeechAct.Force has neither the subjunctive nor the quotative and adds the promise and the exclamation.
• Hacquard gives content only to declaratives and imperatives, and the inquiry licenses no flavor.
• Hacquard's deontic accessibility relation reads the To-Do List of the addressee of whatever event binds the modal, a declarative speech event included, and keeps the worlds compatible with it. Here the To-Do List is the content of an imperative speech event and ranks the worlds instead; the optimal worlds are the compatible ones whenever the list is consistent (SpeechEvent.optimal_toContext_imperative).
• Which event binds a modal is the business of Semantics/Modality/EventRelativity.lean.

References

• Hacquard 2006, Aspects of Modality formalized
• Speas & Tenny 2003, Configurational properties of point of view roles formalized
• Portner 2004, The Semantics of Imperatives within a Theory of Clause Types
• Portner 2018, Mood
• Zanuttini et al. 2012, A Syntactic Analysis of Interpretive Restrictions on Imperative, Promissive, and Exhortative Subjects
• Kratzer 1981, The Notional Category of Modality formalized