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Deictic and Epistemic Distance in Polish

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Abstract

This work investigates the range of pragmatic contexts in which the Polish distal deictic TAM ‘there’ appears and argues that these environments share the feature of epistemic uncertainty, which is the semantic common denominator to all sub-modes of irrealis. The use of TAM in contexts of epistemic uncertainty is motivated by its central meaning. TAM can not only convey semantic distance (spatial) with respect to a proposition, but also epistemic distance, i.e. it can absolve the speakers from the responsibility for the truth of the utterance. Epistemic distance is the feature triggering the expansion of uses from one conceptual domain to another.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: April 16, 2019 | Accepted: July 23, 2019 | Published Dec. 18, 2019 | Language: en

Keywords Polish • Distance • Indefiniteness • Negation • Deixis • Irrealis

Copyright © 2019 Paola Bocale. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-368-7/005


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