Timing of belief as a key to cross-linguistic variation in common ground management

Abstract

In this paper we introduce the notion of Timing of Belief (ToB) as a relevant factor of variation in common ground (CG) management in sentence-peripheral particles across different languages. CG management traces the epistemic development of mutual beliefs between speaker and addressee. Evidence for the relevance of ToB comes from a small-scale acceptability study which tested the relevance of ToB for particles in English, German, and Spanish. While these languages all possess grammaticalized structures to encode different types of knowledge asymmetries between speaker and addressee, they vary with respect to the sensitivity or encoding of ToB. The evident relevance of ToB for CG management suggests that models which focus on the dynamic character of CG development require further expansion. We hope that the fine-graded differences in CG management reported here serve to inspire an engagement with the notion of ToB and the variation we find across languages and dialects.