Epistemic Modality in Amharic (original) (raw)
Related papers
2020
This dissertation examines the voice system of Amharic. I have studied the voice features including an anticausative and a pair of causative functional items focusing on their selection, interpretation and syntactic projection. The voice items display some interesting properties that made them worth an indepth inves tigation. First, the single anticausative morpheme is associated with multiple constructions such as the passive, reciprocal, reflexive, middle and the like. This raises the foundational theoretical problem on the relation between form and meaning. I also want to forward my special thanks to Eba Teresa for reading part of this dissertation and judging on the grammaticality of the Amharic sentences. Many thanks to him. My time in Tromsø would have been boring if I didn't have such dear friends as Etaferahu
Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality. Crosslinguistic perspectives. (Ed. by Dalila Ayoun, Agnès Celle and Laure Lansari).
Epistemic modality and evidentiality are two categories that have not been clearly defined in the literature. In order to clarify the boundaries between them, I draw a detailed semantic map for Catalan modal verbs "deure" (‘must’), "haver de" (‘have to’) and "poder" (‘can/may’) in the Old period (11th–16th centuries). On the one hand, the modals "deure" and "haver de" develop an evidential reading (inferential process). On the other hand, an epistemic possibility value arises in the case of "poder", which is not based on any explicit premise. I show that all these verbs are subjectively construed in different degrees and argue that a clear distinction between the subjective values and an evidential or epistemic interpretation is paramount.
This paper explores the extent to which modality manifests itself in mind. It quantifies as well as qualifies the lexemes that help model meaning in Standard Arabic (SA). For its conciseness, the paper exclusively quotes from the Noble Quran. Methodologically, the study exploits corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and to some extent socio-pragmatic trends. It concordances certain words in context (KWIK) that help shape probable or certain 'ability', 'lack of ability', 'prohibition', 'permissibility', 'willingness', and 'expectation'. The paper advances to classify modality-according to the world in which modality negotiates meaning-into logical, epistemic and deontic ones. In the real world, i.e. what resides in our heads, modality is sub-classified into a logical necessity or logical possibility. In any possible world extending in the universe, modality tends to be epistemic, i.e. knowledgeable. Epistemic modality is subcategorized into an epistemic necessity or an epistemic possibility. In the perfect world, modality is divided into a deontic necessity or a deontic probability. For any ideal obedience, people are expected to obey certain rules. Meanwhile, meaning relations, postulates of meaning, properties of predicates and truth values are examined, suggested, drawn and calculated, respectively. The syntactic analysis of some contextualized words has revealed that SA tends to employ certain words to express possibly and necessarily logical, epistemic and deontic modality.
Competition for agreement and case -a study on the causee and indirect objects of Amharic
2021
In this paper, I argue that agreement and case are assigned in different ways across various causee and other internal arguments. I show that agreement is a relativized system where the presence of one argument DP x higher than the other DP y inhibits the relation of the latter with the verb. Case, on the other hand, is argued to be insensitive to the presence of intervening argument DPs. Case is a fixed relationship between the case assigning head and the DP in its specifier. I explain this distinction by assuming different orders of syntactic operations. Case is assigned early in the syntactic derivation-probably just after Merge. But, Agree relations are established pretty late in the derivation. As such, other syntactic derivations such as Movement (topicalization) affect the nature of Agree relations between two syntactic objects.
Defined as "the ways the writers project themselves into their texts to communicate their integrity, credibility, involvement, and a relationship to their subject matter and their readers" (Hyland, 1999: 101), stance can be expressed by a variety of means, including, among others, hedges, emphatics and attitude markers. The use of these elements-their frequency, distribution and variety in different text types-is language and culture-specific. This paper focuses on selected exponents of stance by which speakers of English and Polish express their assessment of the truth of a proposition and their commitment to this assessment, and more specifically, on high-value modal verbs of epistemic necessity and inference used in linguistics research articles in these two languages. The analysis is based on two corpora of research articles published in the years 2001-2006 in English-and Polish-language linguistics-related journals, each corpus consisting of 200 complete articles. The analysis focuses on the following modal and quasi-modal verbs: MUST, NEED, HAVE (GOT) TO (Eng.) and MUSIEĆ (Pl.) in an attempt to discuss their use in one specific genre and discipline but across languages and cultures. The results indicate that, compared to the English necessity and inference cluster, Polish MUST is heavily underrepresented, but that the proportion of epistemic and root meanings as well as the ratio of epistemic proper and indirect evidential senses is similar across the two studied corpora. It is also apparent that for the English data the relative frequency of individual modal expressions is different from that reported from non-academic varieties of English, and that the proportion of epistemic and root meanings for these modals is different in the studied sample and in non-academic contexts.
Negation in Amharic and Ezha: A comparative perspective
Macrolinguistics
：This article offers a description of negation marking in the two Ethio-Semitic languages: Amharic and Ezha. The description has been made from the perspective of synchronic comparison. The article discloses that both Amharic and Ezha make use of negative prefixes in order to reverse the truth condition of an affirmative expression. The negative morphemes employed by each of the two languages have two allomorphic variants whose alternation is grammatically conditioned. The two allomorphs of the negative marker in Amharic are al-which occurs with perfective and imperative verbs, and a-that surfaces with imperfective and jussive verbal conjugations. Similarly, the Ezha negative prefix appears as an-with perfective verbal bases, and as a-with imperfective, jussive and imperative verb forms. In both languages, the negative prefixes attach to verbs preceding person prefixes and following subordinators in negative subordinate clauses. When it comes to copular and existential verbs, as compared to prototypical verbs, negation in both languages can be expressed in two ways: in some cases, the aforementioned negative prefixes are employed; and in some other cases, completely different verb forms rendering negative readings are introduced, hence, lexical negation via suppletion.
From verb to epistemic marker: bini in Hamedanian Persian
Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
This paper provides data from a regional dialect of Persian, Hamedanian Persian, where a verb is grammaticalized to be used as epistemic modality marker, frequently used in interrogatives. The verb didan, objectively means ‘to see’, but subjectivized in many instances to mean ‘understand’. However, in this dialect, bini, originally the subjunctive second person singular form of the verb didan ‘to see’, is used as epistemic marker. It is used in content and polar questions, where uncertainty is a common feature. Our fieldwork data show that the verb didan is used rarely to mean ‘to see’ and it extended to mark epistemic modality, used as probability marker. This modal marker is only used in questions, which share the stance of uncertainty with epistemic markers. The various features of this grammaticalization path are discussed and an explanation based on egophoricity is provided.