Yael Sharvit (UCLA Linguistics) will be presenting her work on embedded clauses in Magdalena Kaufmann’s semantics seminar on Monday December 10, 3:30-5:30pm, Oak Hall. Those who are interested in attending are encouraged to contact Magda for details.

The Meaning Group will meet on Friday, December 7, 1-2pm in Oak Hall 338 to discuss the paper “An illocutionary account of reportative evidentials in imperatives” by Scott AnderBois (2017, Proceedings of SALT 27). Note that Scott AnderBois will speak at the Logic Colloquium on the same day at 2pm. This paper is related to the topic of his talk.

The Logic Colloquium on Friday, December 7, at 2:00-3:30pm in Oak Hall 112, will feature Scott AnderBois (Linguistics, Brown University)

At-issueness in direct quotation: the case of Mayan quotatives

Abstract: In addition to verba dicendi, languages have a bunch of different other grammatical devices for encoding reported speech. While not common in Indo-European languages, two of the most common such elements cross-linguistically are reportative evidentials and quotatives. Quotatives have been much less discussed then either verba dicendi or reportatives, both in descriptive/typological literature and especially in formal semantic work. While quotatives haven’t been formally analyzed in detail previously to my knowledge, several recent works on reported speech constructions in general have suggested in passing that they pattern either with verba dicendi or with reportatives. Drawing on data from Yucatec Maya, I argue that they differ from both since they present direct quotation (like verba dicendi) but make a conventional at-issueness distinction (like reportatives). To account for these facts, I develop an account of quotatives by combining an extended Farkas & Bruce 2010-style discourse scoreboard with bicontextualism (building on Eckardt 2014’s work on Free Indirect Discourse).