A lexical marker of degrees of answerhood

Abstract

Questions and their answers have been discussed at length over the past few years. In this paper we present and analyze a Hebrew hedger, be-gadol, roughly translated as basically. We use the literature on questions, answers and the relation between them to suggest that be-gadol is an item which conveys a restriction on the context of utterance. This restriction concerns the relation between answers to the QUD on an answerhood scale, which is characterized as involving two notions, informativity (Roberts 1996) and resolution, defined using tools from decision theories (Ginzburg 1995; van Rooij 2003). This significantly supports the linguistic reality of these notions.