UC Davis

The objective of this dissertation is to offer a novel pragmatic theory involving certain appropriateness conditions associated with embedded clauses. In short, the view is that an embedded clause raises a question and answers it too, in its local context. With respect to a local context, there are some conditions governing whether a question can be appropriately raised and whether an answer is an appropriate way of answering the question. The main task of this dissertation is to explore such pragmatic conditions on the relationship between embedded clauses, as question-answer contributors, and their local contexts. As the pragmatic theory is about what counts as appropriate questions and answers in local contexts, call it the Good Question-Answer view, or GQA for short. With this pragmatic theory, I am to apply it to various interesting phenomena invoked by the interaction between embedded clauses and their local contexts. In particular, I argue that GQA can provide an account of why linguistic devices such as focus, it-clefts, rather-than constructions, etc. are capable of affecting the truth-conditional interpretations of certain sentences, e.g. knowledge ascription sentences and counterfactuals. According to the account, such linguistic devices determine what question a clause raises. Consequently, they may bring about some accommodation effect on local contexts of embedded clauses. Whenever the truth-conditional interpretation of a sentence depends on such a local context, these question-regulating devices may have an effect on the interpretation. By proposing such a pragmatic account of the phenomena, we can resist the attempt to drastically change the standing semantic theories in response to the phenomena. For example, Schaffer’s epistemic contrastivism, which takes “to know” as denoting a ternary relation, is partly motivated by the truth-conditional effect of question-regulating devices on knowledge ascription sentences. But if GQA is successful, such semantic revolutions will turn out to be too hasty and unnecessary. Thus, my approach has a conservative bend: Given that a pragmatic account is available, some semantic revolutions will appear less attractive. I will also apply GQA to some problems which have been thought of as semantic puzzles. It has been disputed whether the standing semantic theories of counterfactuals are correct in their commitment to the validity of some inference patterns. I argue that for some puzzles of this kind, it is hasty to take for granted that they are semantic puzzles and consequently to propose new semantic solutions. On the contrary, GQA is able to provide a pragmatic account of these puzzles, provided we take question-regulating devices, which are often ignored in the literature, into account.