Evidence and Bias: The Case of the Evidential Future in Italian

Evidential markers encode the source of information that an individual (the evidential Origo) has for a proposition. In root declaratives, the Origo is always the speaker (see Korotkova 2016 and references therein). Instead, questions often display interrogative flip: the Origo shifts to the hearer (Garrett 2001; Speas & Tenny 2003, a.o.). While interrogative flip is widely attested across languages, some evidentials have been reported not to flip in questions (see, e.g., San Roque, Floyd & Norcliffe 2017; Bhadra 2017). What determines whether evidentials flip or not? Recent work (Korotkova 2016; Bhadra 2017) has proposed that there is a correlation between lack of flip and bias in questions. This paper contributes to our understanding of the interaction of evidentials and bias by investigating the behaviour of questions with the Italian non-predictive future. We characterize the non-predictive future as an inferential evidential marker (see also Mari 2009; Eckardt & Beltrama forthcoming), and show that lack of flip for the future correlates only with a particular type of bias: a reversal of the default bias associated with negative polar questions (Frana & Rawlins forthcoming). We trace back this pattern to an interaction between the evidential component of the future and the operator that triggers bias reversal

Making Worlds Accessible. Essays in Honor of Angelika Kratzer

Every linguist knows how colossal Angelika’s impact on our field is. Hearing aboutthis would not be informative for anybody who might (virtually) pick up this volume, including Angelika herself. So, instead of writing about, say, Angelika’s crucial role in the development of our understanding of modality, we will write about what Angelika means to us, as a teacher, advisor, mentor, colleague, and friend. We know that these words will resonate with many of you (Angelika has meant so much to so many people). We just get to be the lucky ones to tell Angelika publicly.https://scholarworks.umass.edu/ak_festsite_schrift/1000/thumbnail.jp

The construction of viewpoint aspect: the imperfective revisited

This paper argues for a constructionist approach to viewpoint Aspect by exploring the idea that it does not exert any altering force on the situation-aspect properties of predicates. The proposal is developed by analyzing the syntax and semantics of the imperfective, which has been attributed a coercer role in the literature as a de-telicizer and de-stativizer in the progressive, and as a de-eventivizer in the so-called ability (or attitudinal) and habitual readings. This paper proposes a unified semantics for the imperfective, preserving the properties of eventualities throughout the derivation. The paper argues that the semantics of viewpoint aspect is encoded in a series of functional heads containing interval-ordering predicates and quantifiers. This richer structure allows us to account for a greater amount of phenomena, such as the perfective nature of the individual instantiations of the event within a habitual construction or the nonculminating reading of perfective accomplishments in Spanish. This paper hypothesizes that nonculminating accomplishments have an underlying structure corresponding to the perfective progressive. As a consequence, the progressive becomes disentangled from imperfectivity and is given a novel analysis. The proposed syntax is argued to have a corresponding explicit morphology in languages such as Spanish and a nondifferentiating one in languages such as English; however, the syntax-semantics underlying both of these languages is argued to be the same

Special Topics in Linguistics: Genericity

This course will investigate the semantics of generic sentences, i.e., sentences that are used to talk about habits, tendencies, dispositions, or kinds. For instance: Dogs are good pets. The giant panda is an endangered species. A soccer player makes lots of money. Mary smokes after dinner. This machine crushes oranges. This is a half-semester course