St’át’imcets frustratives as not-at-issue modals

Abstract

AbstractThis paper provides an analysis of the ‘frustrative’ markerséna7in St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish), and compares it to similar elements cross-linguistically.Séna7appears in a range of discourse contexts, including when events have an unexpected outcome, fail to continue, or fail to take place optimally. We argue thatséna7felicitously applies to a propositionponly if there is a salient true propositionqand the speaker did not expectpandqto both be true.Séna7encodes epistemic modality, refers only to the speaker’s epistemic state (ignoring the common ground), and has no effect on at-issue truth conditions (séna7(p)entailsp).We show thatséna7provides a diagnostic for distinguishing between entailments and implicatures in the language, and a clear diagnostic for the distinction between futures and prospective aspects. We compareséna7with similar elements in Tohono O’odham, Kimaragang and Tagalog. We argue thatséna7and the Kimaragang frustrative can be captured by the same analysis once independent features of their tense/aspect systems are taken into account. Following Kroeger (2017. Frustration, culmination and inertia in Kimaragang grammar.Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics2(1). 56. 1–29), but pace Copley and Harley (2014. Eliminating causative entailments with the force-theoretic framework: The case of the Tohono O’odham frustrative cem. In Bridget Copley & Fabienne Martin (eds.),Causation in grammatical structures(Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 52), 120–151. Oxford: Oxford University Press), we argue that frustratives should not be unified with non-culminating accomplishments, and can be analyzed without appealing to causality or efficacy.