Abstract
The article deals with implicative verbs, i.e., verbs that, both in their affirmative and negative forms, carry implications as to the factual status of their propositional complements, e.g. manage, forget, bother etc. Karttunen (1971), who introduced the notion, already pointed out that a verb that is implicative in one language need not necessarily have implicative counterparts in other languages. It is conceivable that some languages have semantic groups of implicatives not represented, or less well represented, in other languages, and this deserves to be investigated. In this article the authors offer just a very preliminary exploration based on three languages, one North Germanic, one Fennic, and one Baltic. They show that even such a small sample may reveal interesting differences. The authors also pause over certain general tendencies in the semantic development of implicatives. While most of the work on implicatives has been done in the tradition of formal semantics, the authors show that a more cognitively oriented approach (invoking mechanisms of subjectification) can yield valuable insights into the polysemy of implicatives.
Highlights
The article deals with implicative verbs, i.e., verbs that, both in their affirmative and negative forms, carry implications as to the factual status of their propositional complements, e.g. manage, forget, bother etc. Karttunen (1971), who introduced the notion, already pointed out that a verb that is implicative in one language need not necessarily have implicative counterparts in other languages
Introduction1 In 1971 Lauri Karttunen formulated the notion of implicative verbs, by which he means verbs that, both in their affirmative and their negative varieties, carry certain implications as to the factuality of the situation
Almost all that has been written on implicatives has been written in the tradition of formal semantics
Summary
Almost all that has been written on implicatives has been written in the tradition of formal semantics. (10) It always manages to rain on my day off Coleman suggests this can be accounted for by operating with a hierarchical ordering of presuppositions, presuppositional elements incompatible with the context being successively filtered out: if the presupposition ‘the subject tried to achieve p’ fails, the weaker presupposition ‘p is difficult to achieve’ is substituted, and if that fails as well, what remains is ‘p is unlikely’. A further metaphoric transfer enables the shift to inanimate or ambient subjects in cases like (10) Such processes are semantic, not pragmatic in nature, and they form regular patterns: as we will see below, a similar shift from reference to states of affairs in the extralinguistic world to evaluative meanings is characteristic of many implicatives. We set apart a group of implicatives that are non-specific in the sense of being noncommittal as to the nature of the obstacles, and several groups of more specific implicatives singled out according to the nature of the obstacles involved – mental, emotive, social, physical and spatio-motoric
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