Structure and interpretation of declarative sentences

Declarative sentences are known to be compatible with a wide range of different speech acts. The paper develops, for German, a proposal in which declarative sentences that express assertions, declarations (including explicit performatives), exclamations, wishes, commands, observations (or miratives), reminders and questions have slightly distinct syntactic representations and, consequently, semantic interpretations. The syntactic representation allows for epistemic and evidential modifications of assertions and for markers of assertive strength by speechact-related adverbials and by embedding verbal predicates that are usually analyzed as parenthetical. It also contains new proposals for evidential modal verbs and for the reportative subjunctive in German. Speech acts are interpreted as common ground updates that typically do not only involve an informative update but also a performative update that changes the worldtime indices of the common ground. This does not only hold for declarations but also for assertions and exclamations, where the former are analyzed as creating a commitment to the truth of a proposition, and the latter as committing to an emotional attitude. In contrast to proposals that relegate the illocutionary interpretation of declarative clauses largely to pragmatics, the paper develops a perspective in which it is predominantly a matter of syntactic structure and compositional interpretation.