15 November 2019
12:00 AM
— 12:00 AM
Formal Diachronic Semantics 4
31 October 2019
12:00 AM
— 12:00 AM
48th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest and XXX Biennial Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures
Krifka (2001), based on Löbner (1989), proposes a crosslinguistic account of aspectual adverbials. We consider Spanish todavía ‘still’, ya ‘already’ and aún ‘still’ and discuss some challenges Spanish raises for Löbner/Krifka. Krifka (2001) discusses temporal uses in terms of presuppositions and assertions: e.g. still P asserts that $P$ holds at $t$ and presupposes that there is a time $t’$ immediately preceding $t$ where $P(t’)$ (he is still sleeping). The model can be extended to other scales (the scale is distance in San Diego is still in the US) (Beck 2016).
Ya. Debelcque&Maldonado (2011) discuss ya. They present ya as a pragmatic anchor, grounding the eventuality with respect to time and movement across a ‘dynamic programmatic base’. We argue that our alternative account is more defined and offers specific predictions. First, we claim that ya can appear with covert predicates P, and is consistent with Löbner/Krifka. This accounts for Había tortillas, frijoles, y ya ‘There were tortillas, beans and that was all’, where P is era todo ‘that was all’. Covert predicates also account for the meaning variation when only ya is the overt (e.g. ¿Ya?). Second, we discuss examples where ya is equivalent to clause-final occurrences of already, a modal use (Hay que harcerlo ya ‘It must be done already’). We also discuss the approach of Curco&Erdely (2016).
Todavía, aún. We argue that these adverbials are not synonymous. Todavía is scalar like still, while aún is additive. Additivity permits the concessive interpretation that is also available for aunque (cf. additive particles in Hindi concessives).
7 June 2019
9:30 AM
— 10:15 AM
3rd Budapest Linguistics Conference [BLINC-3]
6 June 2019
5:15 PM
— 6:00 PM
3rd Budapest Linguistics Conference [BLINC-3]
16 March 2019
4:45 PM
— 5:15 PM
9th Meeting of Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages [FASAL9]
Hindi possesses a number of elements (ab(hī) tak, ab(hī) bhī) which roughly correspond to the English aspectual particle still. Crosslinguistically, aspectual particles often come in groups, forming mini-paradigms: the particles already, still, not yet, not anymore and their German and Hebrew counterparts, are argued by Löbner (1989, 1999) and Krifka (2000) to be interrelated by alternations in negation (e.g. not anymore asserts that P is no longer true but presupposes P was true at an early time; while still asserts P to be true and presupposes P was true before). Csirmaz&Slade (2018), comparing Hungarian to English, Hindi, and Nepali, argue for ‘super-paradigms’ of aspectual particles, all deriving from a single underlying template, with differences in which scale is relevant and which constituent is focussed. Differences between the particles ab(hī) tak and ab(hī) bhī in Hindi provide evidence of yet another dimension relevant for ‘paradigms’ of aspectual particles.