"This dissertation concerns the formal pragmatics of constructions in English and Japanese that are perceptively intensificative in their discourse function in some way. In particular I examine polarity emphasis (verum focus), exclamatives, and acts of notification and surprise in language using a compositional version of Farkas & Bruce (2010)'s Table framework, which I dub the lamda-Table framework. I argue that verum is a type of illocutionary modifier that poses restrictions on how an issue on the Table must be resolved, appealing to the idea in dynamic semantics that the motivation for any given speech act is to increase the common ground (CG). Exclamatives are similar in that as a speech act they also allow for the speaker to exclusively dictate what enters the CG. An analytical connection will be made between the illocutionary meaning of questions and exclamatives, the point of which will be that exclamatives are "questions" that exclude the addressee from participation in the conversational process of removing issues from the Table. Thus, exclamatives are noninquisitive moves in which the speaker expresses their subjective judgment for the sake of expressing it. The act of notifying others of some piece of information also has a sense of being coercive in discourse, although not as authoritative as verum or exclamatives. The idea I propose for notification is that it is a kind of evidential construction that indicates that, by virtue of utterance, the hearer has received hearsay evidence for a proposition. I argue that the reason that these classes of sentences feel "emphatic" is because of their common pragmatic pattern in which the speaker dictates how the context is to be shaped, which is an exceptional property compared to more canonical speech acts like assertions and questions that require the collaboration of all discourse participants. This dissertation addresses the broader issue of what it means for a particular level of meaning to be non- truth-conditional, and propose ways of reliably distinguishing illocutionary meaning from conventional implicatures. What examining non-at-issue intensification reveals is that there are parts of the context structure that different levels of meanings are sensitive to, giving us a clearer picture of what the building blocks of discourse are in natural language."--Pages ii-iii.
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