This dissertation argues for the existence of functional attitude predicates, light
attitudes, such as light say and light see. Two phenomena are identified as functional
attitudes: evidentiality and logophoric say-complementizers.
I propose that reportative evidential markers and logophoric licensing complementizers
are cross-linguistic variations of overt morphosyntactic realizations of the same
light attitude: a functionalized predicate say. The parallel between evidentiality and
logophoricity drawn here highlights their properties that have not been discussed or
formally accounted for until now, and explains why they are in a typological complementary
distribution across the world's languages.
At the same time, direct and reportative evidentials even within the same language
exhibit a number of syntactic and semantic differences that have not been noticed in
the literature before. I derive them from the analysis of reportative and direct evidentials
as different kinds of functional predicates: say and perceive, respectively.
After establishing the nature of evidentials, I develop their syntactic and semantic
properties formally. I claim that light attitudes are hosted by a projection cP, which
selects CP and has properties similar to that of the light verb projection vP, such as
argument structure, thematic roles, and `flavors'. The semantic composition of light
attitudes is based on that of lexical attitudes, for which I am following and expanding
ideas from de-compositional semantics. This allows for a simple and conceptually
motivated analysis that does not need any additional theoretical primitives. I develop
novel methodology to test for evidential challengeability and newness of evidentials
that take the between-evidential differences into account. The results support the
representation of the evidential contribution as a presupposition.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/40421 |
| Date | 24 April 2020 |
| Creators | Simeonova, Vesela Tihomirova |
| Contributors | Arregui, Ana, Rivero, Maria-Luisa |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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