Evidentiality and Determination
Abstract
This paper investigates the semantic properties of the French determiner quelque. It is shown that quelque conveys inferential evidentiality, that is, it selects interpretations in which the speaker infers the proposition conveyed by the sentence that hosts the determiner. This accounts for several other properties, for instance the fact that quelque is anti-specific and does not combine freely with negation. A notable consequence of the analysis is that the free choice and positive polarity behaviour of quelque are reduced to its basic semantics.
Published
2019-07-25
How to Cite
Jayez, J., & Tovena, L. (2019). Evidentiality and Determination. Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung, 12, 271-286. https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2008.v12i0.590
Section
Articles
Copyright (c) 2019 Jacques Jayez, Lucia Tovena

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/