Abstract
AbstractModern Greek displays two variants of the word min; one corresponds to a negative marker, and the other corresponds to an epistemic modal. We focus on the latter and provide, for the first time to our knowledge, experimental evidence on its exact interpretation, showing that (i) non-negative min is incompatible with the overt realization of polar propositional alternatives {p,¬p}, (ii) it conveys medium speaker certainty with respect to the expressed proposition p, and (iii) it encodes speaker bias in favor of p. Our findings support the novel generalization that non-negative min is uniformly interpreted as conveying that the speaker is neither unbiased nor negatively biased (as suggested by the previous literature on the topic), but positively biased with respect to a proposition p. We argue that non-negative min is a biased epistemic modal that needs to be licensed by an external non-veridical operator.
Funder
Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
generalitat de catalunya
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
Reference52 articles.
1. Anand, Pranav, and Valentine Hacquard. 2013. Epistemics and attitudes. Semantics and Pragmatics 6(8): 1–59. https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.6.8.
2. Arnhold, Anja, Bettina Braun, and Maribel Romero. 2020. Aren’t prosody and syntax marking bias in questions? Language and Speech 64(1): 141–180. https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830920914315.
3. Austin, John. 1962. How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
4. Büring, Daniel, and Cristine Gunlogson. 2000. Aren’t positive and negative polar questions the same? Unpublished ms., UCLA and UCSC.
5. Castroviejo, Elena. 2021. On wh-exclamatives and gradability. An argument from Romance. Journal of Linguistics 57: 41–82. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226719000306.
Cited by
1 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献