On counterfactual attitudes: a case study of Taiwanese Southern Min

Abstract

This paper investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of counterfactual attitude verbs in Taiwanese Southern Min, showing the differences between this type of attitude verbs and those discussed by Anand and Hacquard (2013). I propose that the semantics of counterfactual attitude verbs is composed of two components, a doxastic assertion and a counterfactual felicity condition, the former of which makes them pattern with representational attitude verbs (Bolinger 1968) whereas the latter differentiates them. This latter component is also responsible for the epistemic licensing behavior of counterfactual attitude verbs, that is, such attitude verbs allowing epistemic necessity but not possibility modals in their complement clauses. This paper contributes to the study of attitude verbs by singling out counterfactual attitudes from the representational category and motivating a finer-grained typology of attitudes based on the distributional facts concerning epistemic licensing. 1 Background This work contributes to the study of attitude predicates by singling out counterfactual attitudes from the so-called "representational attitudes" (Bolinger 1968) and motivating a finer-grained typology of attitudes based on the distributional differences of epistemic modals. This type of attitude expresses the meaning that the attitude holder believes the embedded proposition to be true in the attitude world, but the proposition turns out to be false in the actual world. I call this type of attitude "counterfactual attitudes". In this paper, I investigate the syntactic and semantic properties of counterfactual attitudes, focusing on 掠準 liah8-tsun2 'to think (counterfactually)' in Taiwanese Southern Min (hereafter, TSM) as a case study. TSM has several counterfactual attitude verbs, such as 掠準 liah8-tsun2, 掠做 liah8-tso3, and 叫是 kio3-si7, and speakers of different varieties of TSM may have different choices of verbs as their vocabulary for counterfactual attitude. These three verbs all have similar behavior, as exemplified by 1-3 below. Most of the TSM data used for illustration are extracted from Taiwanese television dramas and folk stories a and Taiwanese Concordancer (Iunn5, Un2-gian5 楊允言 2003). This latter corpus includes more than 3,000,000 words, collected from vernacular texts composed by various authors. In addition to these corpora, some of the examples are produced in an introspective way based on grammaticality judgments of native speakers.