Czech evidential relatives introduced by jak 'how'
Radek Simik, Jakub Sláma
April 2022 

The paper provides a thorough description of Czech relative clauses introduced by the complementizer jak 'how'. We argue that jak-relatives convey an evidential implication, whereby the speaker expects the hearer to have evidence that the predicate-type denotation of the relative clause truthfully applies to its referential head. For instance, "the man how smoked" implies that the hearer has evidence that the man smoked. We further argue that the evidential implication is a conventional implicature in the sense of Potts (2005) - it cannot be semantically embedded, the relative clause cannot be headed by quantificational heads, and cannot contain expressions semantically dependent on matrix operators. At the same time, jak-relatives appear to be able to be arguments of so-called recognitional demonstratives. Counter to Potts' basic assumption, jak-relatives exhibit the paradoxical behavior of commenting on the relative clause head while being able to co-determine its extension.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006089 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Lukasz Jedrzejowski and Carla Umbach (eds.), Non-interrogative subordinate wh-clauses. Oxford University Press.
keywords:	relatives, how, evidentiality, czech, demonstratives, conventional implicatures, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [December 2021] v1 [July 2021]
Downloaded:	1029 times

 

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