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SynSem: Hebrew alulː A mixed-expressive modal with split perspectivization

Batia Snir
Friday, February 5, 2016
3:00-4:00 PM
403 Lorch Hall Map
Abstract: This talk introduces new evidence for the question of judge-dependence across perspectivized constructions. Descriptive grammars (Coffin and Bolozky, 2005) label the Hebrew participial adjective "alul" a "negative" epistemic modal, owing to the fact that it is only used to describe the likelihood of events considered to be undesirable outcomes. This contrasts with the "neutral" term "asui" which can be used felicitously with events of any variety, "bad" ones included. I argue that this "negativity" is realized as an expressive commitment, analyzing "alul" as a mixed-content lexical item (McReady 2010). "Alul" is unusual among mixed-content terms in that its dual contributions are both perspecitivized, each relativized to a specific judge. The epistemic and evaluative contributions are easily separated from one another; they are truth conditionally independent. I show that these two contributions also display divergent patterning in judge selection, and discuss the implications this has for how epistemic and evaluative constructions are perspectivized.
Building: Lorch Hall
Website:
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: Discussion
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Department of Linguistics