Information sharing can be regarded as a form of cooperative behavior protected by the work of a reputation system. Yet, deception in communication is common. The research examined the possibility that speakers use epistemic markers to preempt being seen as uncooperative even though they in fact are. Epistemic markers convey the speakers’ certainty and involvement in the acquisition of the information. When speakers present a lie as indirectly acquired or uncertain, they gain if the lie is believed and likely do not suffer if it is discovered. In our study, speakers of English and Italian (where epistemic markers were presented lexically) and of Estonian and Turkish (where they were presented grammatically through evidentials) had to imagine being a speaker in a conversation and choose a response to a question. The response options varied 1) the truth of the part of the response addressing the question at issue and 2) whether the epistemic marker indicated that the speaker had acquired the information directly or indirectly. Across languages, if participants chose to tell a lie, they were likely to present it with an indirect epistemic marker, thus providing evidence for preemptive action accompanying uncooperative behavior. For English and Italian participants, this preemptive action depended respectively on resource availability and relationship with the addressee, suggesting cultural variability in the circumstances that trigger it.
This monograph discusses scalar verb classes. It tests theories of linguistic form and meaning, arguments and thematic roles, using Estonian data. The analyses help to understand the aspectual structure of Estonian. In Estonian, transitive verbs fall into aspectual classes based on the type of case-marking of objects and adjuncts. The book relates the morphosyntactic frames of verbs to properties typically associated with adjectives and nouns: scalarity and boundedness. Verbs are divided according to how their aspect is composed. Some verbs lexicalize a scale, which can be bounded either lexically or compositionally. Aspectual composition involves the unification of features. Compositionally derived structures differ according to which of the aspectually relevant dimensions are bounded.
This article examines the relation between aspect and object case in Estonian and establishes a verb classification that predicts many facets of object case behavior. It is demonstrated that the aspectual opposition between perfectivity and imperfectivity correspond to the morphological opposition between genitive/nominative case marking and partitive object case marking. However, case marking of Estonian objects is shown to be an unreliable indicator for aspectual verb class membership. The verb classification proposed here is established on the basis of tests that involve only the partitive object case. These tests employ the Estonian progressive. The tests distinguish verb classes from each other according to the situations they typically describe and predict several conditions of case assignment of patterns.
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