Commitment attribution and root complementizers in Catalan

Kurzfassung/Abstract

This article is centered on a root-clause usage of Catalan que. It focuses on the meaning the particle contributes to assertions and polar questions. In particular, it proposes that que serves to attribute a commitment to a proposition to the addressee. The article adopts a recent idea from speech act theory that views commitments as social obligations speakers take up when performing speech acts. While most previous work on assertions focuses on speaker’s commitments, the main contribution of que is an (attributed) addressee’s commitment. The effect of que on the dynamics of the conversation are analyzed adopting Malamud and Stephenson’s dynamic framework and a first formal analysis of the expressive meaning of que is developed by drawing from Krifka (2023a) and Gutzmann (2015).