Craindre (“fear”) and expletive negation in diachrony

Bibliographic Data

ID20034677
AuthorsChloé Tahar (Institut Jean Nicod, DEC, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, corresponding author)
Year2021
Pages287-302
Publication date2021-12-17
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueRomance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2018 (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/cilt.357.15tah
OpenAlexW3213932702
ISBN9789027210128
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited19

This paper investigates the distribution of expletive negation in the complement clause of craindre (“fear”) in French. Building on Anand & Hacquard’s (2013) proposal that fear verbs are hybrid attitude verbs, featuring both a doxastic and a (dis)preferential component, this paper argues that these two components are conveyed by different layers of meaning (in line with Giannakidou & Mari (2020) ). More precisely, I argue that, in actual discourse context, craindre may receive two main interpretations: a volitive (dispreference-related) or a psychological (belief-related) interpretation, depending on whether the verb asserts or presupposes dispreference. Based on a diachronic corpus study of the distribution of expletive negation, I show that expletive negation, in the earliest stages of French, places semantic restrictions on the main verb, which are met when the interpretation of craindre is volitive

Doxastic logic · Epistemology · Linguistics · Negation · Verb · Computer Science · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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