“Mirativity” does not exist: ḥdug in “Lhasa” Tibetan and other suspects

Largely through the efforts of Scott DeLancey the grammatical category “mirative” has gained currency in linguistics. DeLancey bases his elaboration of this category on a misunderstanding of the semantics of h. dug in “Lhasa” Tibetan. Rather than showing “surprising information”, linguists working on Tibetan have long described ḥdug as a sensory evidential. Much of the evidence DeLancey and Aikhenvald present for mirativity in other languages is also susceptible to explanation in terms of sensory evidence or appears close to Lazard’s “mediative” (1999) or Johanson’s “indirective” (2000). Until an independent grammatical category for “new information” is described in a way which precludes analysis in terms of sensory evidence or other well established evidential categories, mirativity should be excluded from the descriptive arsenal of linguistic analysis

Indirect evidentiality and related domains: some observations from the current evolution of the Romanian presumptive.

One distinguishing feature of the Romanian tense-aspect-mood (hence- forth, TAM) domain is the presence of a morpho-syntactic paradigm tradi- tionally labelled the presumptive mood. As noticed several times (Slave 1957, Goudet 1977, Dimitriu 1979, Irimia 1983, Friedman 1986, 2004, Av- ram and Hill 2007, Squartini 2001, 2005, Irimia 2010) this class poses par- ticular theoretical challenges regarding its composition and morphology. Its highly idiosyncratic character is manifested by the presence of unique mor- phological patterns which nevertheless make use of morphological pieces (auxiliaries, participials) which can also be mapped to slightly distinct se- mantics when combined with distinct building blocks. Nevertheless, in the perfect forms, the indirect evidential semantics of the presumptive illus- trates formal syncretism with interpretations corresponding to other modals, like the conditional, or the future, which are normally considered to create individual paradigms (as they are morphologically individuated in the non-perfect uses). And yet another important observation is that in modern Romanian some non-perfect (present) sub-paradigms of the pre- sumptive are morphologically decaying, while their semantics is transferred to the non-perfect forms of the related TAM paradigms. The Romanian presumptive constitutes therefore an excellent testing ground for at least two directions in languages: i) the structure and the development of indirect evidentiality; ii) the morphological distribution of TAM notions, and their interactions. This paper proposes a morpho-semantic analysis of the struc- ture of indirect evidentiality in Romanian,..

A multidimensional analysis of the Spanish reportative epistemic evidential dizque

This paper investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of American Spanish dizque (lit. ‘it is said’). We claim that the not-at-issue meaning of this evidential is reportativity, while it also contributes epistemic modal semantics ranging from doubt/negative attitude, weak possibility to almost complete lack of commitment. This semantics can be derived from ways of updating the common ground and origo ground, and from the fact that evidentials may target evidence strength. We examine the types of speech report dizque introduces, and describe its syntactic behavior in terms of co-occurrence restrictions, scope, and Main Clause Phenomena. Evidential dizque follows patterns ascribable to both Speech Act operators and propositional modifiers. We analyze the semantic contribution of dizque along three tiers of meaning: a) speaker commitment to p, b) contribution to either Speech Act or Propositional level, and c) trustworthiness of the evidence, emerging from the ways dizque expresses presentational force, serving to update either only the origo ground or both the common ground and the origo groundThis work was supported by the Research Project from the Spanish MINECO, FF12017-87140.C4-4-

The Landscape of Speech Reporting

Languages offer various ways to report what someone said. There is now a vast but heterogeneous literature on speech report constructions scattered throughout the semantics literature. We offer a bird’s eye view of the entire landscape of reporting and propose a classification along two dimensions: at-issue vs. not-at-issue, and eventive vs. non-eventive. This bird’s eye perspective leads to genuinely new insights, for instance on the nature of quotative evidentials and reportative moods, viz., that they are both eventive, and hence semantically more like some types of direct and indirect speech than reportative evidentials and modals are

Reassessing the conceptual–procedural distinction

My aim in this paper is to reassess the conceptual–procedural distinction as drawn in relevance theory in the light of almost thirty years of research. In Section 1, I make some comparisons between approaches to semantics based on a conceptual–procedural distinction and those based on a distinction between truth conditions and conditions for appropriate use. In Section 2, I present a brief history of the conceptual–procedural distinction as drawn in relevance theory. In Section 3, I consider the nature of procedural encoding and discuss whether it is best seen as semantic or pragmatic. In Section 4, I outline some parallels and differences between procedural and use-conditional accounts of interjections. In Section 5, I discuss the implications of the conceptual–procedural distinction for lexical pragmatics and consider some recent proposals about how it might be extended. In Section 6, I reassess the conceptual–procedural distinction in the light of current evolutionary approaches to cognition and point out some future directions for research