Gradable assertion speech acts – to appear in the proceedings of NELS48 Gradable assertion speech acts * Yael Greenberg & Lavi Wolf Bar Ilan University, Hebrew University 0. Introduction This paper suggests integrating two lines of thought in the semantic-pragmatic literature, that are usually dealt with separately. The first line takes speech acts to be syntactically and compositionally active, as they can be negated, conjoined, embedded, modified by various operators etc. (e.g. Cohen & Krifka 2014, Thomas 2014, Beck 2016). We will concentrate here on assertion speech acts, and the covert speech act operator ASSERT. The second line suggests representing some epistemic modals (e.g. modal adjectives) similarly to gradable adjectives like tall / clean, i.e. as denoting degree relations, and in particular as relations between propositions and degrees of probability / belief / credence (e.g. Yalcin 2007, 2010; Lassiter 2015, 2017, cf. Farkas & Roelofsen 2017) rather than as denoting quantification over possible worlds (Kratzer 1981, 1991, and many others). While in this paper we do not take a stand in the debates about whether this is the best analysis of modal adjectives (cf. Klecha 2012, Herburger & Rubinstein 2014, 2018), we will rely on the idea of graded epistemic modality and will integrate it with the view that assertion speech acts are compositionally active. In particular, we will suggest that the covert speech act operator ASSERT is itself gradable: It denotes a (credence) degree relation and is modifiable by overt and covert degree modifiers, manipulating the degree of credence towards the asserted proposition. We will show that such a view enables capturing newly observed parallels between overt and covert degree modification of adjectives at the propositional level and some overt and covert modifiers of assertion speech acts. The paper is structured as follows: Section 1 reviews existing claims that Modal Adverbs (MADVs henceforth) differ from Modal Adjectives (MADJs henceforth) in being illocutionary modifiers which change the degree of credence in asserted propositions. Section 2 develops a compositional analysis of this view, where ASSERT denotes a * Thanks to Brian Buccola, Ariel Cohen, Donka Farkas, Julie Goncharov, Andreas Heida, Angelika Kratzer, Manfred Krifka, Dan Lassiter, Aynat Rubinstein, Todd Snider, Stephanie Solt and anonymous NELS48 reviewers. Research on this project is supported by ISF grant # 1655/16 to Yael Greenberg.