UC Santa Cruz

In this thesis, I propose unifying unembedded and embedded rising declaratives by adopting an approach that treats them as the same phenomenon. First, I present evidence that embedded rising declaratives should be united with their unembedded counterparts. Both embedded and unembedded rising declaratives share an intonation, as well as discourse effects. As part of unifying them, I develop a taxonomy of embedded and unembedded rising declaratives. This taxonomy breaks them into two types - one that seems to raise a question (called an inquisitive rising declarative), and one that seems to make an assertion (called an assertive rising declarative). I then explore what can and cannot embed a rising declarative, with a discussion of Simons (2007) and the predicates she discusses. Second, I describe two previous approaches that can account for either unembedded inquisitive rising declaratives or unembedded assertive rising declaratives (Farkas & Roelofsen, 2017; Malamud & Stephenson, 2015). I also discuss two approaches that do treat unembedded inquisitive rising declaratives and assertive rising declaratives as united phenomena (Goodhue, 2021; Jeong, 2018). Then, I build out a theory of rising declaratives where rising declaratives are a discourse move that speakers can make when they are attempting to resolve the main issue through a series of questions, called a Strategy. As part of this, the rise in rising declaratives contributes unsettledness about one of the questions in the Strategy. I propose a way of modeling this in the Table model.