Sarah E. Murray (Assocaite Professor, Department of Linguistics, Co

The Semantics of Evidentials

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

This book provides a compositional, truth-conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. Central to the proposed theory is the distinction between what propositional content is at-issue and what content is not-at-issue. Evidentials contribute not-at-issue content, and can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. In this volume, Sarah Murray builds on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials and related phenomena, and proposes a semantics that does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, she argues that all sentences make three contributions: at-issue content, not-at-issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At-issue content is presented and made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground; not-at-issue content directly updates the common ground; and the illocutionary relation uses the at-issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type, can trigger further updates. 0The analysis is supported by extensive empirical data from Cheyenne, drawn from the author's own fieldwork, as well as from English and a variety of other languages.

Produktdetails

• Oxford Studies in Semantics and Pragmatics
• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 192
• Erscheinungstermin: 16. Mai 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 245mm x 174mm x 15mm
• Gewicht: 336g
• ISBN-13: 9780199681587
• ISBN-10: 0199681589
• Artikelnr.: 47858853

Autorenporträt

Sarah E. Murray obtained her PhD from Rutgers University in 2010, and is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University. Her main research interests are the semantics and pragmatics of natural language, and she works extensively with Cheyenne, an Algonquian language spoken in Montana and Oklahoma. Her work has been published in journals such as Semantics and Pragmatics and International Journal of American Linguistics, as well as in edited volumes including OUPs Methodologies in Semantic Fieldwork (eds Ryan M. Bochnak and Lisa Matthewson, 2015).

Inhaltsangabe

1: Introduction
2: A semantic classification of evidentials
3: Evidentials and varieties of update
4: Declarative sentences
5: Interrogative sentences
6: Conclusion
Appendix A: Definitions and worked examples
Appendix B: Semantic contributions by phenomenon