Greek non-negative min, epistemic modality, and positive bias
Tsiakmakis, Evripidis (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Filologia Catalana)
Borràs Comes, Joan Manel 1984- (Universitat de Barcelona. Laboratori de Fonètica)
Espinal, M. Teresa (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Centre de Lingüística Teòrica)

Date:	2022
Abstract:	Modern Greek displays two variants of the word min; one corresponds to a negative marker, and the other corresponds to an epistemic modal. We focus on the latter and provide, for the first time to our knowledge, experimental evidence on its exact interpretation, showing that (i) non-negative min is incompatible with the overt realization of polar propositional alternatives {p,¬p}, (ii) it conveys medium speaker certainty with respect to the expressed proposition p, and (iii) it encodes speaker bias in favor of p. Our findings support the novel generalization that non-negative min is uniformly interpreted as conveying that the speaker is neither unbiased nor negatively biased (as suggested by the previous literature on the topic), but positively biased with respect to a proposition p. We argue that non-negative min is a biased epistemic modal that needs to be licensed by an external non-veridical operator.
Grants:	Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca 2017-SGR-634 Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación PID2020-112801GB-I00
Note:	Altres ajuts: acords transformatius de la UAB
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Subject:	Modern Greek ; Epistemic modality ; Experimental approach ; Min ; Positive bias
Published in:	Natural language & linguistic theory, Vol. 41 Núm. 3 (2022) , p. 1257-1285, ISSN 1573-0859

DOI: 10.1007/s11049-022-09565-y

29 p, 1.5 MB

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