VeReWebLin Chiara Gianollo 2020 03 24 скачать в хорошем качестве

VeReWebLin Chiara Gianollo 2020 03 24

Chiara Gianollo, University of Bologna. Indefinites and cyclical change. Epistemic indefinites, such as e.g. English some or French quelque, signalignorance on the part of the speaker with respect to the identity of theintended witness to the existential claim (cf. the volume edited byAlonso-Ovalle & Menéndez-Benito 2015 for a crosslinguistic overview).Epistemic indefinites have the function of blocking undesired inferences on thepart of the hearer (avoidance of a false claim, avoidance of an exhaustivityinference). Given their semantic characterization, they are rarely found inassertive contexts. For this reason, they can be the starting point of a cyclicalprocess of change, known as Argument Cycle (Ladusaw 1993) or Quantifier Cycle(Willis 2011), whereby an indefinite item goes from a ‘positive’ to a more‘negative’ meaning. In this paper I show how the cycle applies to Latin aliquis‘some (or other)’ and to its Romance descendants (Italian alcuno,French aucun, Spanish algún, etc.) (Gianollo 2018: ch. 2 and 3).By means of this case study I reach a more precise semantic and syntacticcharacterization of the starting point of the cycle, and I discuss similaritiesand differences with respect to similar diachronic developments within Germanic(English any, Dutch enig). Moreover, I show how the furtherdevelopment of this cycle is influenced by pragmatic pressures that areanalogous to those motivating Jespersen’s Cycle and result in the emphaticexpression of negation. Emphasis, which I analyze as a form of scalar focus,has important effects both on the semantics of the indefinite item and on itsDP-internal syntax, as will be shown by means of a comparative study of theRomance descendants. Chiara Gianollo isAssociate Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Bologna. Sheobtained her MA and PhD from the University of Pisa and has held appointmentsas lecturer and researcher at the Universities of Trieste, Konstanz, Stuttgart,and Cologne. Her main research areas are diachronic syntax and semantics, withspecific focus on the use of formal theoretical linguistics to investigate thehistory of Greek, Latin, and Old Romance. She has recently published themonograph Indefinites between Latin and Romance. OUP, 2018.