MULL-lab will be meeting this Tuesday, March 28th at 3:00 pm. Meetings take place in Rm. 002 of the McGill Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join in person.
This week, Bernardas will be presenting a talk entitled: ‘Restrictions on because-clause adjunction in Lithuanian’. The abstract is below.
Because-clauses can possess three distinct readings, whose availability depends on the presence of covert embedding structure. For this talk, I focus on what I term the ‘epistemic’ reading, which is generated by a covert epistemic verb. Data from Lithuanian (Baltic, Balto-Slavic) demonstrates that this reading is incompatible with the ‘inferential evidential’ construction. Rather than contradicting the covert verb analysis, I show that this is predicted via a closer examination of its modal semantics. By treating it as a resultative, incompatibility with the ‘epistemic’ reading is a general function of the latent causativity of the inferential evidential.
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