natasha korotkova

The paper develops a unified account of evidentials as self-ascriptions of a mental state and places them in a larger context of self-attributions, expressions that denote self-knowledge. This novel account derives aspects of the linguistic behavior of evidentials from the interaction of their conventional meaning and of the properties of cognitive processes they describe. The following patterns characterize the behavior of evidentials cross-linguistically: (i) strictly speaker-oriented interpretations in root declaratives; (ii) an obligatory de se construal in attitudes, (iii) resistance to denials in dialogues, and (iv) the lack of speaker-oriented interpretations in canonical information-seeking questions. Previously viewed as unrelated, and some of them not even discussed, those patterns follow in a principled way from the proposed account. In addition to providing a uniform solution to the known puzzles, the account of evidentials as self-attributions makes correct empirical predictions not made by previous analyses of evidentiality.

This paper is devoted to the conversational dynamics of Russian questions with the left-periphery particle razve. Razve-questions seem to convey negative bias in conflicting evidence scenarios, thus bearing superficial resemblance to questions with English really (cf. Repp and Geist., forth.). I argue that razve-questions signal that the speaker is in a situation with belief revision potential, facing a conflict between a prior belief and a current abductive inference. Depending on context, such questions receive (i) an information-seeking intepretation or (ii) what I will call a 'point-making' interpretation. I propose a unified semantics for razve, while also showcasing the limitations of current approaches to question bias.

This paper is about what we call Deontically-flavored Nominal Constructions (DNCs) in English, such as No ice cream or Dogs on leash only. DNCs are often perceived as commands and have been argued to be a type of non-canonical imperative, much like root infinitives in German or Russian. We argue instead that DNCs at their core are declaratives that cite a rule but can be used performatively in the right context. We propose that DNCs contain an elided deontic modal, i.e., allowed, whose presence explains their distributional restrictions and interpretational properties. Among other things, we speculate on the licensing conditions of DNCs (the presence of only or the negative determiner no), suggesting that these are tied to the properties of discourses in which rules can be used naturally.

Find-verbs — English find, German finden, French trouver and their counterparts in other languages — have figured prominently in the literature on subjective language, as they only allow complements that are about matters of opinion, rather than fact. This paper focuses on a lesser-studied property of find-verbs: the ban on must-modals in their complements and their interaction with epistemics and evidentials at large. The find-must ban has been attributed to a clash in subjectivity, with must-modals assumed to not be of the right type. We argue instead that the find-must ban is of evidential nature: find-verbs convey directness, must-modals convey indirectness, and their combination is a semantic contradiction. We couch our proposal in terms of von Fintel and Gillies’s (2010) kernels, modal bases responsible for direct knowledge. We show that find-verbs ban a variety of indirect markers across languages and further argue that find-verbs can embed epistemic modals, but only those that do not semantically encode indirectness, and thus draw a line between semantic vs. pragmatic evidential effects.

Subjective language has attracted substantial attention in the recent literature in formal semantics and philosophy of language (see overviews in MacFarlane 2014; van Wijnbergen-Huitink 2016; Lasersohn 2017; Vardomskaya 2018; Zakkou 2019b). Most current theories argue that Subjective Predicates (SPs), which express matters of opinion, semantically differ from ordinary predicates, which express matters of fact. We will call this view “SP exceptionalism”. This paper addresses SP exceptionalism by scrutinizing the behavior of SPs in attitudes, which, as we will argue, significantly constrains the space of analytical options and rules out some of the existing theories. As first noticed by Stephenson (2007b,a), the most prominent reading of embedded SPs is one where they talk about the attitude holder’s subjective judgment. As is remarked sometimes (Sæbø 2009; Pearson 2013a), this reading is not the only one: embedded SPs may also talk about someone else’s, non-local, judgment. We concentrate specifically on such cases and show that non-local judgment is possible if and only of SPs are used outside main predicate position and the entire DP is read de re. We demonstrate that the behavior of SPs in attitudes does not differ from that of ordinary predicates: it follows from general constraints on intersective modification and intensional quantification (Farkas 1997; Musan 1997; Percus 2000; Keshet 2008). We argue that this unexceptional behavior of SPs in fact has unexpected consequences for SP exceptionalism. Precisely because SPs have been argued to be semantically different from ordinary predicates, not all theories correctly predict these less-studied data: some overgenerate (e.g. Stephenson 2007b,a; Stojanovic 2007; Sæbø 2009) and some undergenerate (e.g. Pearson 2013a). Out of the currently available theories, only relativist accounts (Lasersohn 2005; MacFarlane 2014; Coppock 2018) predict the right interpretation, and only that interpretation. We thus present a novel empirical argument for relativism, and, more generally, formulate a constraint that has to be taken into consideration by any view that advocates SP exceptionalism.

Languages vary in whether evidentials can appear in attitudinal complements. In some languages, e.g. Georgian (South Caucasian; Boeder 2000), syntactic embedding of evidentials is possible, while in some others, e.g. Abkhaz (Northwest Caucasian; Chirikba 2003), it is not. The semantic literature largely views the variation in embeddability of evidentials as evidence for the semantic heterogeneity of evidentiality as a category. I show that even though (non-)embeddability is a matter of cross-linguistic variation, it is not a case of genuine semantic variation in evidentiality. Drawing on data from Turkish, where evidentials can appear in tensed but not in nominalized complements, I propose that restrictions on embedding of evidentials are due to the syntax of clausal complementation. I put forth the following generalization: evidentials are embeddable only in those languages that have such complements that have enough structural space to host them.

Recent years have seen a lot of research on evidentiality within formal semantics and pragmatics. The near-consensus in the literature is that the type of evidence signalled by the evidential marker, which I will refer to as the Evidential Requirement (ER), is not asserted and should be analyzed as a conventional trigger of Not-At-Issue (NAI) content. By scrutinizing empirical diagnostics previously used to support the ER-as-NAI view, the paper aims at disentangling how different notions of (not-)at-issueness can be applied to evidentiality, and develops objections to the idea that evidentials always conventionally encode NAI content.

Given that sentences often underdetermine event construal, how do lan- guage users associate event representations with strings? One possibility is that the human language sentence processing system constructs a sin- gle event unless the context or grammar suggests otherwise. We present evidence that the perception of complex predicates in Russian is influenced by a general preference for a single event construal. In essence, perceivers are biased to resolve distorted speech towards a single event interpreta- tion when grammatically licensed. In this study, we used the phonemic restoration method to explore how a single event preference would affect the restoration of the conjunction morpheme, which disambiguates between two structures with different event profiles.

This paper is about what Ninan (2014) (following Wollheim 1980) calls the Acquaintance Inference (AI): a firsthand experience requirement imposed by several subjective expressions such as Predicates of Personal Taste (PPTs) (delicious). In general, one is entitled to calling something delicious only upon having tried it. This requirement can be lifted, disappearing in scope of elements that we will call obviators. The paper investigates the patterns of AI obviation for PPTs and similar constructions (e.g., psych predicates and subjective attitudes). We show that the cross-constructional variation in when acquaintance requirements can be obviated presents challenges for previous accounts of the AI (Pearson 2013, Ninan 2014). In place of these, we argue for the existence of two kinds of acquaintance content: (i) that of bare PPTs; and (ii) that of psych predicates, subjective attitudes and overt experiencer PPTs. For (i), we propose that the AI arises from an evidential restriction that is dependent on a parameter of interpretation which obviators update. For (ii), we argue that the AI is a classic presupposition. We model both (i) and (ii) using von Fintel and Gillies’s (2010) framework for directness and thus connect two strands of research: that on PPTs and that on epistemic modals. Both phenomena are sensitive to a broad direct-indirect distinction, and analyzing them along similar lines can help shed light on how natural language conceptualizes evidence in general.

This paper is devoted to what I will call quotative uses of hearsay evidentials, wherein they report a speech act made by a third party. Occasionally mentioned in the typological literature, quotative uses were first given a formal semantic account by Faller 2002 and have received little attention since. The goal of this paper is to put the spotlight on them. An ongoing debate in the literature is on the semantic status of evidentials and the place of evidentiality among other categories (see Matthewson 2012 and references therein). For Faller (2002, 2007), quotative uses are among the empirical tests that diagnose illocutionary evidentials, ones that deal with the structure of speech acts. In this paper, I re-implement Faller's original proposal within Krifka's (2014) framework that provides an explicit syntax-pragmatics interface. I then show that quotative readings may be the only argument, out of the currently provided in the literature, in favor of the existence of illocutionary evidentials. However, the status of such readings requires further research. I conclude by discussing quotative uses within a broader context of reported speech strategies.

Across languages, grammatical evidentials (linguistic expressions of information source) exhibit the property of non-challengeability: they resist direct denial in dialogues. The literature attributes this property to the not- at-issue status of the information contributed by evidentials. I argue against this view and show that with respect to disagreement, evidentials pattern with subjective expressions such as first-person belief and pain reports. Like other subjective expressions and unlike e.g. appositives, evidentials ban all kinds of disagreement about content and not just explicit denial. This novel observation has no account in the literature. It falls out naturally once a theory of evidentiality incorporates subjectivity. It is thus unnecessary to appeal to a special discourse status of evidentials to explain their behavior in conversations.

This paper is devoted to evidentials in attitudinal complements. I start with two empirical observations. A. Some logically possible interpretations are systematically not attested for evidentials-in-attitudes. This new observation has no straightforward account in the current literature. B. Languages vary with respect to whether or not evidentials-in-attitudes shift, i.e. whether they are speaker-oriented (as in root declaratives) or not. The variation has been previously attributed to the semantic non-uniformity of evidentials. I argue against this view. To account for A, I propose that evidentials are self-ascriptions, which is additionally motivated by their behavior in matrix clauses. To account for B, I propose that evidential shift is an instance of indexical shift driven by a monster operator a la (Anand and Nevins 2004), which explains previously unnoticed similarities in restrictions on both kinds of shift. Understanding what happens in attitude reports has often been key to the semantics of many phenomena, e.g. pronouns and modals. Offering the first systematic examination of evidentials-in-attitudes across languages, the paper makes a case for evidentials and broadens our understanding of perspective-sensitivity in general.

The paper explores a Russian two-clausal construction that was previously argued to instantiate wh-scope marking. I examine a range of syntatic and semantic properties of this construction and show that it is far from canonical scope marking, though might look similar. I refute the scope marking analysis as it fails to predict and explain certain restrictions and propose an alternative approach, wherein the construction in question is a parenthetical that triggers a Potssian conventional implicature. This proposal helps to grasp restrictions intrinsic to Russian and broadens the typology of scope marking and similar looking phenomena.

This article deals with the order of verbal suffixes in Adyghe, a polysynthetic language of the Caucasus. Traditionally the structure of the Adyghe wordform and the order of its affixes were described in terms of template morphology. However, we present new data demanding another, substantially different approach. We demonstrate that for the most part suffix ordering within the Adyghe verb follows strictly compositional rules. This feature is a manifestation of the polysynthetic nature of the language.