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In this paper I raise the question of how the concepts of speaker commitment and speaker involvement can be applied to evidential expressions. I therefore explore the distinction between commitment and non-commitment as a binary opposition (cf. Katriel and Dascal, 1989; Kissine, 2008 ) and show that a choice for a binary opposition leads to a clear differentiation of epistemic and evidential markers. Speaker involvement is different from speaker commitment, in that it is gradable. This notion will be relevant at both a propositional and an interactional level of analysis. At the propositional level, I claim that speaker involvement refers to the speaker’s processing of the evidential qualification when presenting a state of affairs. At the interactional level, speaker involvement will be shown to play a role in the online planning of the flow of discourse. In my corpus analysis of the Spanish evidential adverbials al parecer ‘apparently’ and por lo visto ‘seemingly’, I will argue that the coparticipant’s reply to evidentially qualified propositions is an important methodological tool to examine speaker involvement. Moreover, the monitoring of the evidential dimension in interaction will shed new light on non-commitment (cf. Déchaine et al., 2017 ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: While the semantic approaches differ on whether there is a negative operator (¬: ) or a non-negative inequality operator (>: ) in the comparative, various issues remain unresolved surrounding the “negativity” of comparatives. This paper proposes a novel dichotomy of comparatives between ‘rhetorical’ comparatives (RCs) and regular ‘degree’ comparatives (DCs), and shows that only RCs convey “negativity” in a way parallel to negativity in rhetorical questions; while regular DCs merely establish an ordering between two objects. The variation concerning negativity in turn squares neatly with the presupposition toward the content of the standard (negative presupposition in RCs and no presupposition in DCs). In exploring the semanticopragmatic properties of RCs, it is shown that rhetorical effects can be triggered by negative polarity items, expletive negation, and the subjunctive mood. This result supports an important insight that negative polarity items and the subjunctive are of similar nature (), and goes one step further to suggest another important link between expletive negation and the subjunctive mood. This analysis implicates that the three components are closely connected under the principle of non-veridicality. The notion of RCs in the sense that we suggest here can give us a plausible foundation for the analysis of rhetorical effects in other environments, for instance, rhetorical questions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Complaints have been studied from two major disciplinary perspectives. Whereas pragmatic approaches have tended to rely on data elicited via discourse completion tests (DCTs), more ethnomethodologically informed approaches have focused on naturally occurring talk in interaction. In addition, a handful of studies have examined written complaints, while fewer still have investigated complaints in CMC (computer mediated communication). In order to determine the extent to which CMC complaints display some of the defining characteristics of complaints as identified by previous research, a data set of 100 complaints (negative reviews of hotels on the website, TripAdvisor) was examined. The study found that a significant proportion of complaints tended to juxtapose overall negative evaluation with some positive appraisal, and that a similar proportion of the complaints made explicit reference to reviewer''s expectations not being met. The study also found that complaints tended to occur as a speech act set. Whereas previous studies have found that complaints tended to co-occur with speech acts such as warnings or threats, in this particular context, complaints tended to co-occur more frequently with advice and recommendations. Finally, the study found that while the majority of the complaints on TripAdvisor can be considered indirect (or third party) complaints, there were nevertheless some examples that blur the direct/indirect dichotomy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

By adding further linguistic evidence (e.g., semantic, semiotic and functional similarities) to the studies of Leech (Leech, Geoffrey N., 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. Longman, London) and Nakau (Nakau, Minoru, 1994. Principles of Cognitive Semantics. Taishukan Shoten, Tokyo) on the relationship between mental and speech act verbs, this paper argues that mental verbs (e.g., think) and speech act verbs (e.g., say) essentially depict the same phenomenon, which Dahl (Dahl, O¨sten, 1997. Egocentricity in Discourse and Syntax. Available from calls ‘internal reality’. The difference is that mental verbs depict the ‘internal reality’ still in the private domain, while speech act verbs refer to the same phenomena made public (i.e., externally manifested). This paper points out that this dichotomy relates to well-known epistemological dichotomies such as ‘ego vs. non-ego’ (Akatsuka, Noriko McCawley, 1978. Another look at no, koto, and to: epistemology and complementizer choice in Japanese. In: Hinds, John, Irwin, Howard (Eds.), Problems in Japanese Syntax and Semantics. Kaitakusha, Tokyo, pp. 178–212), ‘experiencing self vs. observing self’ (Lyons, John, 1982. Deixis and subjectivity: loquor, ergo sum? In: Jarvella, R.J., Klein, W. (Eds.), Speech, Place, and Action. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, New York, pp. 101–124; Lyons, John, 1989. Semantic ascent: a neglected aspect of syntactic typology. In: Arnold, G.D. et al., (Eds.), Essays on Grammatical Theory and Universal Grammar. Oxford University Press, London, pp. 153–186), ‘S-perspective vs. O-perspective’ (Iwasaki, Shoichi, 1993. Subjectivity in Grammar and Discourse. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam) and ‘private vs. public’ (see Dahl, 1997 above). It then argues that such a dichotomy also serves to differentiate self- vs. other- addressed questions, and wish vs. command. That is, the same dichotomy cuts across the three major sentence types (statement, question, and command). Therefore, it is possible to use this dichotomy as a new principle for organizing sentence typology. In addition, this paper notes that this epistemological dichotomy is reflected in the grammaticalization of the verb ‘say’ and the semantic extension of the two Old Japanese question particles ka and ya. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]