Take on this commitment: the particle 'bərə' in Marathi (Indo-Aryan)

Abstract

The particle bərə in Marathi optionally occurs in final position in declaratives, imperatives, and wh-interrogatives giving rise to different discourse effects. This paper presents the first description of utterance-final bərə in declaratives and imperatives, offering a unified analysis for its distributional profile and interpretive effects. I will claim that in these uses, bərə has an advisory effect: a bərə-using speaker conventionally expresses their preference that the addressee undertake a dependent doxastic or preferential commitment to the content introduced by the speaker. A second conventional component is a felicity condition that undertaking this commitment is a pre-condition for fulfilling a contextually salient addressee-benefiting goal. The existence of this conventionalized cross-clausal discourse strategy reinforces a view on which models of discourse update must not only track (i) evolving interlocutor beliefs and preferences; but also (ii) speaker attitudes regarding how commitments should be optimally taken on by their interlocutors; and (iii) how acts of taking on commitments relate to the broader action choices and goals of interlocutors.