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« Phonology Group | Main | 2007 Egg School in Brno»

Hara and Kawahara in the Evidentials Group

Shigeto Kawahara and Yurie Hara will present their work on intonation and evidentiality in Japanese at the evidentials grant group meeting on Monday, May 7, at 12:30 pm in the Partee Room. Here's the abstract.

[Thanks Peggy!]

The Emergence of the Evidential Intonation

We discuss a new intonational pattern for a baised question which recently emerged among young speakers of Tokyo dialect: Rise with Deaccentuation (RwD). In this intonational pattern, the lexical accent of the predicate is deleted while keeping the intonational rise utterance-finally. We observe that RwD is licit only when the speaker has direct evidence for the proposition being asked: RwD is a direct evidential marker which contributes to the expressive level of meaning (Potts 2005). Furthermore, we attempt to explain how the new semantic evidential meaning arose spontaneously. We speculate that evidential meaning can be decomposed into bias, contributed by negative rising question intonation, and giveness, expressed by deaccentuation.