The goal of the sections to follow is to discuss the encoding of speech acts (other than topics) in DGS. Before starting the discussion, some terminological remarks are in order since there is a plethora of related, but still different notions used in the literature. The notions that need clarification are ‘sentence type’ (or ‘clause type’), ‘sentence mood’, ‘illocutionary force’, and ‘speech act’. I will follow a tra-dition that mainly comes from the German linguistics literature (e.g., Meibauer 1987; Zaefferer 1987; Grewendorf & Zaefferer 1991; Brandt et al. 1992; Zaefferer 2006; Gutzmann 2015). The differences between sentence types, sentence moods, and speech acts is one of linguistic perspective and goes back to the seminal
ob-servation of the division of labor between the semantic content of a sentence and the way the sentence is used by Gottlob Frege (1918/1919: 62):13
An interrogative sentence and an assertoric one contain the same thought, but the assertoric sentence contains something else as well, namely asser-tion. The interrogative sentence contains something more too, namely, a re-quest. Therefore two things must be distinguished in an assertoric sentence:
the content, which it has in common with the corresponding propositional question; and assertion.
Frege’s idea was that the semantic content, i.e., the proposition of an assertion, a question, and an order could be one and the same and thus, there must be some-thing else in a sentence that leads to the different meanings of these three types.
For an illustration, consider the minimal pairs in (49a), (49b), and (49c). All three sentence are about a person named Dede, a beer, and a drinking relation between Dede and the beer. Thus, they all have the same propositional content, or, as it was called in later works, they have the same ‘sentence radical’ (Wittgenstein 1953: §22; Stenius 1967). They only differ in what is called ‘sentence mood’. Thus, a sentence is always made up of two semantic parts, a sentence radical and a sen-tence mood. Sensen-tence mood is sometimes written as an operator, as illustrated to the right of each sentence.
(49) a. Dede drinks a beer. ⁉⊢[drink(Dede, beer)]
b. Is Dede drinking a beer? !⊢?[drink(Dede, beer)]
c. Drink a beer, Dede! ⊢?![drink(Dede, beer)]
As the symbolic notations show, sentence mood operates over the whole sen-tence radical in each case. ‘Sensen-tence mood’ is a semantic term, as should have become clear from the discussion so far. The same phenomenon, i.e., the differ-ences between the sentdiffer-ences in (49), can also be viewed from syntax as each sentence has a different syntactic structure. This means, that each sentence has a specific morpho-syntactic form that is systematically linked to a specific type of meaning. This form of a sentence is called its ‘sentence type’.
13English translation from Frege (1997: 329). The original quote reads: “Fragesatz und Behaup-tungssatz enthalten denselben Gedanken; aber der BehaupBehaup-tungssatz enthält noch etwas mehr, nämlich eben die Behauptung. Auch der Fragesatz enthält etwas mehr, nämlich eine Auf-forderung. In einem Behauptungssatz ist also zweierlei zu unterscheiden: der Inhalt, den er mit der entsprechenden Satzfrage gemein, hat und die Behauptung.”
As sentence types (sometimes called ‘form types)’ are syntactically defined they are described in syntactic terms (this can be done on different levels of pre-cision). Cross-linguistically, different syntactic structures (at least surface struc-tures) are linked to the same meaning, i.e., the same sentence mood. I therefore choose a very coarse and simple terminology for sentence types: I will simply add the label ‘sentence’ to the name of the mood. A sentence expressing declarative mood is thus called a ‘declarative sentence’ or a sentence expressing interroga-tive mood, an ‘interrogainterroga-tive sentence’.
Although there is a relation between sentence type and sentence mood, there is no one-to-one mapping between them. There are, for example, different im-perative sentence types, linked to imim-perative mood in German, as illustrated in (50).
‘Drink a beer right now!’
b. Dass
‘Drink a beer right now!’
The examples show that there are different ways to express an imperative in German. The example in (50a) shows a verb-first imperative sentence and (50b) a verb-last imperative sentence. Although they cannot be used interchangeably, both sentence types encode imperative mood.
The term ‘sentence’ is used here in a rather abstract way. Sentences do not exist in a vacuum, but are used, i.e., they are uttered. One and the same sentence can be used to achieve different goals. We can, for example, use a declarative sentence, such asDede drinks a beer(49a) to make an assertion. However, the same sentence could be used as an order, for example, when uttered to a bartender. Therefore, there is no one-to-one mapping, but rather a mapping between sentence type and the speech-acts that can be performed with them. From this, we can derive
[…]that it is only the communicative potential of a sentence, a default in-terpretation, that is determined by its formal and semantic properties. The precise speech act performed by an utterance is the result of an interaction between these properties and various contextual factors, such as the social situation, the current state of an interaction and the background knowledge of speaker and hearer. (König & Siemund 2007: 277)
A ‘speech act’ is defined as the performative function a sentence fulfills when ut-tered (Austin 1962). To be more precise, a speech act is an action that is used by a speaker or signer to achieve a certain goal. Such goals can be to add information to the current information storage shared by the interlocutors (i.e., to make an assertion), to ask an interlocutor to provide information that the signer/speaker is missing (i.e., to ask a question), to make the hearer do something (i.e., to make a directive), or to express surprise (i.e., to make an exclamation). A speech act con-sists of two parts: a proposition and a(n) (illocutionary) force. The latter is the aspect of meaning that makes clear whether the utterance should be understood as an assertion, a question, a directive, a warning etc. While there may be no one-to-one mapping between sentence mood and illocutionary force, sentence mood nevertheless has a prototypical illocutionary force associated with it. This is plausible because, under normal circumstances, a hearer infers the force of an utterance from a combination of three sources: the context, the mood (encoded by a certain sentence type), and the proposition expressed. Without contextual enrichment, a declarative is understood as a statement, an interrogative as a ques-tion, and an imperative as an order, or more broadly speaking as a directive. Thus, when no context is present, the mood (i.e., the semantics) leads to a prototypical reading.
Typologically, it is assumed that all languages exhibit declarative, interroga-tive, and imperative sentences as basic sentence types (e.g., Lyons 1977; Sadock &
Zwicky 1985). This means that it is not only taken as a universal that statements, questions, and orders can be expressed in all languages, but that all languages have syntactic means to encode those communicative functions. Table 3.3 shows the three basic sentence types, the sentence moods they are prototypically linked to, and the speech acts that they are primarily used for. Somewhat surprisingly, it is only these three sentence types that are universal, and no language was found to grammaticalize, e.g., the expression of warnings, promises, or acts of forgiveness. Nevertheless, there are languages that have means to express sen-tence types other than declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives, for example, exclamatives (for the expression of exclamations), optatives (for the expression of desires), or exhortatives (incentives for joint action).
That all languages exhibit encoding strategies for declarative, interrogative, and imperative clauses and that some even use grammatical heads with phono-logical content for their encoding, lead several authors to the conclusion that there exist dedicated functional projections to encode their respective illocution-ary force (e.g., Rizzi 1997; Cinque 1999; Ambar 2003). This does not mean that every possible speech act has its own phrase, but it is usually assumed that there
Table 3.3: Basic sentence types
Sentence type Sentence mood Illocutionary force Declarative sentence Declarative Assertion
Interrogative sentence Interrogative Question Imperative sentence Imperative Directive
only exists such a phrase for the three basic sentence types, as they are (more or less) directly linked to an illocutionary force (e.g., Speas & Tenny 2003).
In the following sections I will discuss declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives, and make some brief remarks on optatives. In each section, I will (i) first briefly give a cross-linguistic overview of the sentence type under discussion, often ac-companied by exemplary analyses from the literature, (ii) review how the respec-tive sentence type is expressed in other sign languages, again accompanied by exemplary analyses from the literature, and finally (iii) discuss and analyze the sentence type in German Sign Language.