Daria Popova made a presentation on the topic of "Information packaging in constructions with an evidential function"

Daria Popova made a presentation on "Information packaging in constructions with an evidential function" at research seminar "From The Logical Point of View" on December 20.

Abstract

The talk focuses on two constructions with propositional verbs: regular embeddings 'William said that Kate is doing great' and slifts 'Kate is doing great, William said'. The constructions have similar lexical content, but differ in a number of ways. First, constructions behave differently in the discourse. In slifts, but not in regular embeddings, the proposition 'William said that Kate is doing great' is discourse inert in the sense that it cannot address the question under discussion and cannot be negated in the subsequent discourse. Second, new experimental data show that the constructions differ in speaker commitment, which aligns with the observations in (Asher 2000; Koev 2021). Third, not all propositional predicates that appear in regular embeddings can appear in slifts (Hooper 1975; Koev 2021). Factive predicates ('be happy, regret') and negative attitude predicates ('deny, doubt') cannot appear in slifts ('*Kate is doing great, William is happy/denied'). In the talk I formalize the discourse behavior facts in terms of different common ground updates, impositions (AnderBois et al. 2010) and proposals (Farkas and Bruce 2010). I argue that the differences in speaker commitment, discourse behavior and the propositional verbs distribution can be derived from the proposed formalization.