Skip to Content

Search: {{$root.lsaSearchQuery.q}}, Page {{$root.page}}

Linguistics Colloquium

Ashwini Deo, University of Texas at Austin
Friday, October 7, 2022
4:00-5:30 PM
Virtual
Ashwini Deo is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin. She will present, "Coordinated on the context: Discourse salience, exclusivity, mirativity, precisification, and intensification in Marathi"

ABSTRACT
Several Indo-Aryan languages, including Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, and Marathi contain a discourse clitic whose uses overlap with those of English particles like exclusives only/just, intensifiers really/totally, precisifiers right/exactly/absolutely, anaphoric indeed/that very, and scalar additive even without corresponding perfectly to any of them. In this talk, I offer an analysis of the varied and seemingly disparate uses of this particle, focusing on the Marathi variant -ts. I claim that =ts conventionally signals that interlocutors are in mutual agreement that the proposition denoted by the prejacent is uniquely salient among alternatives in the current question. That is, =ts conveys that the proposition expressed by the prejacent offers a schelling point (or focal point) for the interlocutors to coordinate on. Most effects associated with =ts are shown to arise as a consequence of pragmatic reasoning about the position of the prejacent with respect to the contextually given ordering on the current question. In addition to offering a unified analysis for Marathi =ts and its functional cognates in Indo-Aryan, this new perspective can open the door to a better understanding of why exclusivity, mirativity, precisification, and intensification might cluster together in languages. In closing, I consider the implications of =ts’s meaning for a crosslinguistic picture of the lexicalization of some discourse-managing functions.
Building: Off Campus Location
Location: Virtual
Event Link:
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: colloquium, Language, Lecture, Linguistics
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Department of Linguistics