Chapter 15
Craindre (“fear”) and expletive negation in diachrony
Chloé Tahar | Institut Jean Nicod, DEC, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University
This paper investigates the distribution of expletive negation in the complement clause of craindre (“fear”) in French. Building on Anand & Hacquard’s (2013) proposal that fear verbs are hybrid attitude verbs, featuring both a doxastic and a (dis)preferential component, this paper argues that these two components are conveyed by different layers of meaning (in line with Giannakidou & Mari (2020)). More precisely, I argue that, in actual discourse context, craindre may receive two main interpretations: a volitive (dispreference-related) or a psychological (belief-related) interpretation, depending on whether the verb asserts or presupposes dispreference. Based on a diachronic corpus study of the distribution of expletive negation, I show that expletive negation, in the earliest stages of French, places semantic restrictions on the main verb, which are met when the interpretation of craindre is volitive.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Psychological and volitive readings of craindre
- 2.1Inquisitive craindre que
- Practical goal
- Presupposition projection under negation
- Mood selection behavior
- 2.2Admonitive craindre que … ne
- Practical goal
- Presupposition projection
- Mood selection behavior
- 2.3Reprehensive craindre que … ne
- Practical goal
- Compatibility with the speaker’s knowledge that p
- 3.Corpus
- 4.Diachronic analysis
- 4.1The original semantics of ne: A speech-act negation
- 4.2The gradual loss of ne’s speech-act potential
- 5.Conclusion
-
References
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Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Tsiakmakis, Evripidis, Joan Borràs-Comes & M. Teresa Espinal
2023.
Greek non-negative min, epistemic modality, and positive bias.
Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 41:3
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