Non-speaker-oriented Expressives in Ktunaxa and English

Starr Sandoval

The Slurring Terms Across Languages (STAL) network (https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/home) invites you to a talk by Starr Sandoval (University of British Columbia) entitled "Non-speaker-oriented Expressives in Ktunaxa and English". The talk will take place online on JUNE 4, 14:30-16:00 Central European Summer Time (CEST), and is part of the of STAL network seminar series. If you want to participate, please write to [email protected] for the Zoom link. Below you can find the abstract.

All welcome!

ABSTRACT

This paper provides the first documentation and analysis of expressive nouns in Ktunaxa, a severely endangered language isolate spoken in Interior British Columbia and the northwest United States. Ktunaxa expressives liberally allow non-speaker-oriented interpretations under attitude reports. This contrasts English expressives, which are usually speaker-oriented. Most accounts of English expressives treat their judge as contextually variable (e.g. Potts 2007, Schlenker 2007). I argue this analysis is better suited for Ktunaxa, and I suggest more rigid theory of expressives in English to account for their default orientation to the speaker.