Information, issues, and attention

A sentence is informative if there are possible worlds that are eliminated from the common ground by each of the proposed updates, and it is inquisitive if it proposes two or more alternative updates, requesting information from other participants in order to establish at least one of these updates. This chapter argues that this notion of meaning has an additional advantage. It discusses a recapitulation of inquisitive semantics, and presents the definition of the semantics. The chapter shows how attentive content can be captured in a natural extension of this framework. It examines pragmatic aspects of the interpretation of sentences that are not merely informative, but also inquisitive and/or attentive. The chapter describes the behaviour of might in certain embedded contexts, and argues that the semantic meaning of might sentences is strengthened in a particular way before being composed with the semantic meaning of the embedding operator. Keywords: attentive content; epistemic modal operator; informative content; inquisitive semantics