On the Grammar of Optative Constructions

Abstract

The primary aim of this dissertation is to present an analysis for so-called optative constructions, clauses that express a wish, hope or desire without containing a lexical item that means 'wish', 'hope' or 'desire'. A secondary aim is to contrast optative constructions with so-called polar exclamatives, clauses that express surprise, shock or dismay at a given fact without containing a lexical item that means 'surprise', 'shock' or 'dismay'. The goal is to better understand the way in which syntax, semantics and pragmatics interact in order to yield the meanings and uses that these constructions have.The core claim is that we can understand optative constructions by virtue of exploring three properties that they share. First, I argue that optatives (and polar exclamatives) contain a generalized exclamation operator EX, which serves to express an emotion towards the status of the modified proposition on a contextually provided scale. Second, I argue that semantic mood (including factivity and counterfactuality) is encoded in a distinguished Mood head, the content of which co-determines both morphological mood and the material that overtly surfaces in the position of C. Third, I argue for a generalized analysis of prototypical particles, including non-exclusive ONLY, concessive AT LEAST and unstressed DOCH. My analysis treats these particles as truth-conditionally vacuous presupposition triggers, which interact with optativity in three different ways. First, they convey additional information with respect to the modified proposition. Second, they eliminate alternative readings for an ambiguous clause, due to incompatibility. Third, this disambiguating role makes them ideal licensors for a marked utterance type.Chapter 1 of this dissertation is an introductory chapter that presents the core proposal in a nutshell. After this coarse overview, chapter 2 reviews some basic definitions and background on optatives and polar exclamatives. Subsequently, I proceed to a presentation of my entire system in chapter 3. The following chapters discuss each of the three core parts in turn, starting with the EX operator in chapter 4, followed by semantic mood in chapter 5 and finally I discuss particles in chapter 6. Chapter 7 concludes.

Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures

“…We have not studied in detail the prosodic properties of focus fronting under this interpretation; one of the examples in our prosodic experiment clearly elicited a dislike evaluation, 15 and the fronted focus displayed the same plateau profile which was observed in the other cases (see Section 2.1). Pending further investigation, we will tentatively assume -following again Grosz (2011) -that these cases are just like our MF, except for the fact that the interpretation involves a bouletic ordering source, rather than a stereotypical one (on ordering sources, see Section 5.3).…”

“…To sum up, in this paper we have proposed an analysis of the mirative import which can be associated with the fronting of a focal constituent in Italian: this conveys that the asserted proposition is less likely than one or more distinct focus alternatives (see Grosz 2011). We have characterized the mirative import as a conventional implicature but, following an insight of Zimmermann (2007), we have argued that it is not purely anchored to the speaker: it is based on a shared modal base (the context set) and on an ordering source that can be anchored to one of the conversational participants, or to the whole conversational community.…”

“…The author argues that the past tense conveyed by the Imperfect does not temporally locate the state described in the clause, but rather, it shifts backward the temporal parameter of the doxastic modal base representing the speaker's beliefs: in this way, surprise is defined with respect to the speaker's past beliefs up to the discovery time in which she realizes that the actual state of affairs (John's being a smoker) contradicts her previous beliefs. Similarly to Grosz (2011), the mirative import of the Spanish Imperfect is defined in terms of the relative likelihood of the asserted proposition q and one relevant focus alternative (which is constrained to having the same aspectual value as q).…”

“…(Note that we are not claiming that mirativity in general necessarily involves the comparison of focus alternatives, but that this is the crucial contribution of focus in the case under exam; see Section 6 for more discussion.) In order to formally model this idea, we will adapt a proposal by Grosz (2011), which characterizes unexpectedness in terms of the comparative likelihood of alternative propositions.…”

“…However, there is no consensus as to whether mirativity must be treated as a separate category (Aikhenvald 2004, Torres Bustamante 2012 or as an overtone or extension of evidential markers (Lazard 1999, Rett & Murray 2013. The issue is particularly difficult to tackle in light of the wealth of different phenomena that manifest an unexpectedness import across languages: most notably exclamative clauses (see, a.o., Zanuttini & Portner 2003, Rett 2011, Peterson 2010, Giurgea 2014, exclamations (Rett 2011), European Portuguese "evaluative fronting" (Ambar 1999), (some uses of) GermanĀ-fronting (Frey 2010), unembedded dass-clauses in German (Grosz 2011), the mirative use of the imperfect in Spanish (Torres Bustamante 2012, and mirative evidentials (Rett & Murray 2013).…”