At-issueness in direct quotation: the case of Mayan quotatives

In addition to lexical verbs of saying, many languages have more grammaticized means for reporting the speech of others. This paper presents the first detailed formal account of one such device: quotative morphemes in Mayan languages, with a focus on Yucatec Maya ki(j). When mentioned in previous literature, quotatives have either been regarded as a special kind of verb of saying or reportative evidential. I argue that quotatives have important differences (and some similarities) with both verbs of saying and reportatives. To capture these properties, I propose a "scoreboard" account where quotative ki(j) signals that the co-occurring quotative material demonstrates a move in an in-narrative scoreboard

An illocutionary account of reportative evidentials in imperatives

This paper provides a detailed analysis of reportative evidentials in imperative sentences, drawing on original fieldwork in Tagalog and Yucatec Maya. Previous literature presents two distinct views of such sentences, which we dub 'imperative-by-proxy' and 'neutral report' views. Based on a range of data across different sorts of imperative uses in different sorts of contexts, we argue for a version of the 'imperative-by-proxy' theory and propose a formal analysis with theory of illocutionary updates

A'ingae =sa'ne 'APPR' and the semantic typology of apprehensional adjuncts

We explore the semantics and typology of functional morphemes encoding apprehensional, i.e. negative prospective, meanings through a detailed case study of the adjunct uses of =sa'ne 'APPR' in A'ingae (or Cofán, ISO 639-3: con, an Amazonian isolate). We provide one of the first formal accounts of apprehension: In a structure [p [q=sa'ne]], =sa'ne 'APPR' encodes a modal semantics where the goal worlds of the actor responsible for p avoid a salient situation r=>q. Finally, we reveal two inherent asymmetries among apprehensional functions (precautioning asymmetry and timitive asymmetry), thus making substantial predictions with regards to typological patterns in apprehensional morphology

Coordination, coherence and A’ingae clause linkage

This paper examines a particular type of clause linkage (‘bridging’) in A’ingae, an en-dangered isolate spoken in Amazonian Ecuador and Colombia.We propose a formalcharacterization of its meaning (to our knowledge the first formal account for any language)that relies crucially on two SDRT coherence relations: NARRATION and BACKGROUND.We motivate this characterization with textual data and elicited data from context-relativefelicity judgments, and propose to derive it from independently observable facts aboutprosody, coordination, and anaphora in the languag

On the exceptional status of reportative evidentials

One of the central questions in the study of evidentials cross-linguistically is to what extent (and in what ways) evidentials differ across languages and across evidence types. This paper examines one such instance of variation: the ability for a single speaker to deny the scope of a reportative evidential, an instance of what we dub 'reportative exceptionality' (RE). Empirically, we show that RE is widely attested across a diverse range of reportatives. Theoretically, we propose a pragmatic account treating RE as an instance of pragmatically-induced perspective shift. Having done so, we propose a semantics for illocutionary evidentials on which reportatives are given a treatment uniform to other evidence types

Sluicing as anaphora to issues

Since Merchant 2001, it has been widely agreed that the licensing condition on Sluicing is at least partly semantic in nature. This paper argues that the relevant semantic condition is one of symmetric entailment over a semantics which includes not only truth-conditional information, but also issues in the sense of Groenendijk & Roelofsen 2009. One kind of evidence for the proposal comes from expressions like doubly-negated inde?nites and implicit passive agents which do not license Sluicing despite truth-conditional equivalence to overt inde?nites. In addition to these facts, the paper examines novel data which show that Sluicing is not licensed by even overt inde?nites inside of appositive relative clauses, arguing that these facts (and related facts regarding VP-Ellipsis) follow from the account together with an independently motivated semantics for appositives

Answering implicit questions: the case of namely

Though several prior works use English namely as evidence for the semantics of other elements, its own syntax and semantics have been mostly unexamined. In this paper, we focus on two central questions which we claim to be interrelated. First, what is the semantic contribution of namely? Second, how does namely combine with the surrounding material compositionally to produce appropriate overall sentence meanings? Given the apparent similarity of namely to fragments and Sluicing, one answer suggested in previous literature (e.g. Onea & Volodina (2011), Weir (2014), Ott (2016)) is that an example like Someone coughed, namely Bill. involves deletion of silent linguistic material . . . Bill coughed. Here, we argue against this idea, arguing that namely introduces an answer to an implicit specificational question combining with its complement (i.e. Bill in the above example) directly, similar to Qu-Ans analysis of fragments (Groenendijk & Stokhof (1984), Jacobson (2016))

Crossing the appositive / at-issue meaning boundary

Our goal is to provide systematic evidence from anaphora, presupposition and ellipsis that appositive meaning and at-issue meaning, e.g. as contributed by the relative appositive and the main clause in John, who nearly killed a woman with his car, visited HER in the hospital, have to be integrated into a single, incrementally evolving semantic representation. While previous literature has provided partial arguments to this effect (Nouwen 2007 for anaphora, Amaral et al 2007 and Potts 2009 for both anaphora and presupposition), the systematic nature of this evidence -- in particular, the evidence from ellipsis we will introduce -- has been previously unnoticed. We propose an analysis of these phenomena that integrates the dynamic account of anaphora and ellipsis as discourse reference to individuals and properties (respectively) with an account of at-issue meaning as a proposed update of the input Context Set (CS) that is to be negotiated and of appositive meaning as an actual / imposed update of the CS that is not up for negotiation

LingView: A Web Interface for Viewing FLEx and ELAN Files

This article presents LingView (https://github.com/BrownCLPS/LingView), a web interface for viewing FLEx and ELAN files, optionally time-synced with corresponding audio or video files. While FLEx and ELAN are useful tools for many linguists, the resulting annotated files are often inaccessible to the general public. Here, we describe a data pipeline for combining FLEx and ELAN files into a single JSON format which can be displayed on the web. While this software was originally built as part of the A’ingae Language Documentation Project to display a corpus of materials in A’ingae, the software was designed to be a flexible resource for a variety of different communities, researchers, and materials.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Morphological Alternations at the Intonational Phrase Edge

This article develops an analysis of a pair of morphological alternations in K\u27ichee\u27 (Mayan) that are conditioned at the right edge of intonational phrase boundaries. I propose a syntax-prosody mapping algorithm that derives intonational phrase boundaries from the surface syntax, and then argue that each alternation can be understood in terms of output optimization. The important fact is that a prominence peak is always rightmost in the intonational phrase, and so the morphological alternations occur in order to ensure an optimal host for this prominence peak. Finally, I consider the wider implications of the analysis for the architecture of the syntax-phonology interface, especially as it concerns late-insertion theories of morphology