Friday February 6: Tamara Vardomskaya

Join us this Friday as Tamara Vardomskaya (PhD Student, Linguistics) presents some of her work on predicates of personal taste!

SPEAKERS: Tamara Vardomskaya
TITLE: ‘Evidential Subjectivity’
DATE: Friday 2/6
LOCATION: Rosenwald 208
TIME: 11:30 am – 1:20 pm

ABSTRACT:

Intuitively, subjective predicates (tasty, fun, smart) and evidentials (apparently, seems, presumably) have much in common. Both privilege the belief state of a particular individual, most commonly the speaker. Both are arguably related to epistemic modals (Stephenson 2007, MacFarlane 2014, Matthewson et al 2007, among many others). However, most investigations of subjectivity focus on languages like English where evidentials are optional, and most investigations of evidentiality do not look at subjective predicates. Thus, studies that touch on both subjectivity and evidentiality, such as (Krawczyk 2012, Bylinina 2014, Duchene et al 2014), are still infrequent.

In this workshop I will explore how a model of evidentiality and epistemic state can account for properties of subjectivity like faultless disagreement. I draw from MacFarlane’s (2014) model of assessment sensitivity; from analyses of faultless disagreement as metalinguistic negotiation, such as (Barker 2012); and from models of evidence for evidentials (McCready 2010, McCready and Ogata 2007, Krawczyk 2012).

Based on this, I argue that different speakers act based on different sets of evidence for the felicity/sincerity of subjective predicates. Thus, subjective predicates should be discussed in terms of sincerity conditions rather than truth conditions, as argued by Faller (2002), Murray (2010), and many others for evidential constructions as illocutionary acts. A more general theory of subjective predicates and evidentials can explain some interesting phenomena, such as the widespread faultless disagreement available in evidential-rich Cree (Duchene et al 2014).

This is preliminary research, and constructive criticism is welcome and encouraged.