A QUESTION OF COMMITMENT * Christine Gunlogson University of Rochester Abstract This paper addresses certain restrictions on the use of declaratives as questions in English. Declaratives are taken to express commitment by the speaker, even in a questioning use. The analysis traces the restrictions to two distinct contextual factors: (i) a general principle requiring that a commitment have a recognized source, i.e., a discourse agent who plausibly has independent evidence supporting the content committed to; (ii) specific to a questioning interpretation, the need for the context to support the inference that the speaker’s commitment depends upon the addressee’s anticipated confirmation. Rising intonation contributes a very general element of meaning, indicating that the utterance it marks is contingent upon some discourse condition obtaining; the specific conditions required for a questioning interpretation instantiate one such type of contingency. The proposals are modeled via elaboration of standard contextual structures in a possible-worlds framework. 1. Introduction Consider the three sentences in (1): (1) a. Is the server down? Polar interrogative b. The server’s down? Rising declarative c. The server’s down. Falling declarative In English, the polar interrogative in (1a) is the prototypical form for asking a yes/no question. (1c) is a declarative with falling intonation, the canonical device for making a statement. Rising intonation, indicated by the question mark in (1b), renders the declarative superficially similar in effect to a polar interrogative: (2) a. The server’s down? ≈ Is the server down? b. You ate lunch already? ≈ Did you eat lunch already? However, the distribution of declaratives as questions is considerably more restricted than that of interrogatives (Bartels 1997; Gunlogson 2003). In this paper I will be concerned with a particular restriction on declarative questions: they are awkward ‘out of the blue’, with no contextual setup, as in (3):