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The grammar of fear in Australian languages and beyond| old_uid | 15448 |
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| title | The grammar of fear in Australian languages and beyond |
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| start_date | 2015/04/03 |
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| schedule | 11h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | This paper examines the phenomenon of grammatical markers – labelled variously apprehensive, timitive or evitative – which encode modal meanings of undesirable possibility, as in the second clause of the English utterance Watch out for cars, (otherwise) you might get run over. In other words, they mark an event as one to be feared and to be avoided, and, as in the example above, are often used in conjunction with an imperative clause. Although markers with meanings of this types have been described e.g. for Australian, Papuan and Austronesian languages, they have been virtually ignored in the semantic literature on modality. After an illustration of the phenomenon from a range of languages, I will in particular address the phenomenon of the historical sources of such markers. Attested sources include complementizers with main verbs of fear (Lichtenberk 1995), prohibitives (Pakendorff & Schalley 2007), but also general modal markers (Verstraete 2005) and conjunctions expressing temporal sequence such as German nachher ‘afterwards’, Dutch straks ‘soon, later’ (Boogaart 2009), and Northern Australian Kriol bambai (derived from English by and by; Angelo & Schultze-Berndt to appear). In the latter case, the semantic change from temporal to apprehensive marker can be argued to involve pragmatic strengthening in two respects: first, by conventionalization of an invited inference from temporal succession to causality, and further from (general) caused event to undesirable caused event. |
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| responsibles | Coupé |
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