What is at-issueness? An experimental comparison of diagnostics.

Joint work with Conglei Xu and Judith Tonhauser.

At-issueness is a key concept in theoretical semantics/pragmatics, but there is no consensus about how it is defined or diagnosed (e.g., Tonhauser 2012; Snider 2017b; 2018; Tonhauser et al. 2018; Koev 2018; Faller 2019; Korotkova 2020). We present experimental data investigating whether four widely used diagnostics for at-issueness yield consistent results. Our findings reveal significant differences across diagnostics, indicating they are not interchangeable, and that the speech-act in which the diagnosed content is embedded matters: We get a clearer picture when assessing the not-at issue content of different expressions in questions rather than assertions.