Journal of Semantics Advance Access published online on June 20, 2008
Journal of Semantics, doi:10.1093/jos/ffn001
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Evidentiality of Discourse Items and Because-Clauses
Kyoto University
Correspondence: Department of Linguistics Graduate School of Letters Kyoto University Yoshida-honmachi Sakyo-ku Kyoto 606-8501 Japan e-mail: yuriehara{at}gmail.com
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There is a parallelism between contrastive marking and evidential marking with respect to their distribution among adjunct clauses. I take this fact to show that both contrastive marking and evidential marking express some attitude towards a closed proposition, following Johnston's (1994) analysis that the semantics of temporal and if-clauses involve event quantification while that of because-clauses is a relation between two particular events. Furthermore, this association between the implicature and the attitude-holder cannot be established in certain constructions, namely adjunct clauses and relative clauses. Hence, I argue that the computation of contrastive marking involves an island-sensitive movement of an operator.
Received for publication 8 July 2006. Revision received 15 May 2007. Accepted for publication 5 August 2007.