Expressing Ignorance in the Nominal Domain: Japanese Wh-ka
نویسندگان
چکیده
The expression of modal notions cuts across morphosyntactic categories. Moving beyond the verbal domain, we find, across languages, types of indefinite noun phrases that convey modal meanings (Haspelmath 1997). For instance, the so-called epistemic indefinites (EIs), like Spanish algún or German irgendein, convey speaker’s ignorance. To illustrate, the Spanish sentence in (1) implicates that the speaker does not know which student María is dating (Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito 2003, 2010).
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