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On truth unpersistence: At the crossroads of epistemic modality and discourse

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Abstract

We propose a semantic analysis of the particles afinal (European Portuguese) and alla fine (Italian) in terms of the notion of truth unpersistence, which combines both epistemic modality and constraints on discourse structure. We argue that the felicitous use of these modal particles requires that the truth of a proposition \(p^{*}\) fail to persist through a temporal succession of epistemic states, where \(p^{*}\) is incompatible with the proposition modified by afinal/alla fine, and that the interlocutors share knowledge of a previous epistemic attitude toward \(p^{*}\). We analyze two main cases, that of plan-related propositions and that of propositions without plans. We also discuss the connections between truth unpersistence and evidentiality.

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Notes

  1. Although most of the examples in the paper include a negation, this is not required by the semantics of the particles, as shown below by examples (3a,b).

  2. The notion of incompatibility that is relevant for the semantics of these particles will be detailed in Sect. 2.

  3. Given conditions (C1) and (C2), it is more natural to have a positive rather than a negative proposition in the role of the shared proposition \(p^{*}\) since people usually don’t entertain negative plans or say what they are not going to do. Arguably, this would not be informative, because we are generally more interested in what people are going to do rather than in what they are not going to do. On the other hand, it is perfectly natural to have a negative proposition as the prejacent of alla fine/afinal. For example, the speaker of (3a,b) might equally well utter (ia, b):

    1. (i)
      1. a.

        Afinal hoje não vou ao teatro.

      2. b.

        Alla fine non vado a teatro questa sera.

        ‘Afinal/alla fine I’m not going to the theater tonight.’

  4. In Italian, the adverb poi ‘then’ can be used in combination with alla fine to reinforce the effect of the latter, as in, e.g., Alla fine poi Micha non è russo. In this function, poi can co-occur with alla fine also when the prejacent is plan-related, as shown by the possibility of saying Alla fine poi non ci vado al cinema domenica sera or Alla fine poi le Olimpiadi 2016 non si terranno a Rio de Janeiro (we thank Andrea Bonomi for calling our attention to this interpretation of poi). It is interesting to remark that expressions related to temporal language, in particular to the concept of temporal succession, systematically take on the non-temporal meaning of unpersistence of truth. In this regard, one may point to a semantic similarity between alla fine, on the one hand, and expressions like dopo tutto ‘after all’ and in fin dei conti ‘after all is said and done’ (lit. ‘at the end of the sums’), which can also be found in contexts of ∼TP.

  5. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for making this connection apparent to us. The feature of alla fine and afinal which constrains the possible discourse sequences and excludes continuations that “open up” the issue again which had been closed by the afinal statement could be seen as an instance of a general principle of grammatical change. In the literature on syntactic and semantic change, this is known as “persistence” (Hopper 1991), a principle by which aspects of the lexical meaning of the source lexical item that underwent change may impose constraints on the distribution of the reflex.

  6. In the next sections we will consider newspaper examples with afinal/alla fine showing that the speaker and hearer’s epistemic attitudes need not be concerned, as other epistemic agents become relevant.

  7. The syntactic position of afinal and alla fine with respect to the predicate expressing epistemic change (above or under the latter) is irrelevant in this respect: the interpretation obtained is the same. For example, we can detect no difference in meaning between the naturally-occurring discourse (i) and its variant (ii):

    1. (i)

      Correre senza il mio fedele […] garmin inizialmente mi aveva smarrito, senza un riferimento, andatura, tempo, km percorsi… poi invece, ho scoperto che alla fine non è così essenziale, si può far benissimo senza.

      ‘Running without my trustworthy garmin at first had got me lost, without a reference, pace, time, covered distance… but then I discovered that alla fine it is not so essential, one can well do without it.’ (http://sergiosambataro.blogspot.fr/2012/03/la-mia-prima-maratona.html)

    1. (ii)

      […] poi invece, alla fine ho scoperto che non è così essenziale, si può far benissimo senza.

    The examples presented in this section show both possibilities.

  8. From the newspaper Público, Editorial, 5/5/2014.

  9. From the corpus CETEMPúblico, par=ext8453-soc-91b-1.

  10. This complex property of the presuppositional antecedent \(p^{*}\) may be thought of in terms of Zeevat’s (2009) notion of weak presupposition, which Zeevat regards as unavoidable for the analysis of discourse particles, in particular correction markers (to whose class afinal and alla fine may be plausibly ascribed). According to this author, “the weak presupposition may be in the common ground as such, but it can equally well be in the common ground as a suggestion, as an opinion of somebody or merely as a plausible inference” (Zeevat 2009: 127). We thank an anonymous reviewer for calling our attention to Zeevat’s work.

  11. From: Ravelli, Fabrizio. ‘Si, Aricò Ha Assassinato Ambrosoli’. La Repubblica. 22 October 1985. Available at http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/1985/10/22/si-arico-ha-assassinato-ambrosoli.html. Accessed: 27 November 2015.

  12. Our sense of dialogic is close in spirit to the notion of “polyphonie” proposed by Anscombre and Ducrot, see Ducrot (1984).

  13. A similar description is provided for some uses of afinal: “∼ p peut également correspondre à une attente (ou croyance) de la communauté” (Lopes 2011: 135, footnote 3).

  14. From the newspaper Il Cittadino, March 3rd 2014 (http://www.ilcittadino.it/p/notizie/cultura_e_spettacoli/2014/03/03/ABlv3dsD-italia_ramazzotti_marzo_voce.html).

  15. Spenader (2002) shows that in naturally-occurring texts it is quite common for the use of presupposition triggers to involve accommodation.

  16. We thank two anonymous reviewers for bringing this type of example to our attention.

  17. Note that the alternative possibilities are mutually exclusive; the fact that there was debating entails that the other possibilities were incompatible with the possibility of going to the seaside this summer (regardless of which of those other possibilities is selected to instantiate \(p^{*}\), it will clash with the prejacent of alla fine).

  18. From the newspaper corpus La Repubblica.

  19. In diachronic corpora of Portuguese it is possible to find examples in which afinal has a temporal value akin to the interpretation of alla fine described in this section (Lopes 2011: 132–133).

  20. In the following naturally-occurring examples showing the modification of temporal alla fine by focusing adverbs, an implicit event-argument is contextually retrieved for the aspectual operator denoted by alla fine, as made explicit in the English glosses:

    1. (i)

      Proviamo a vincerle tutte e vedremo. Solo alla fine si saprà se sarà stata una stagione di successo o no.

      ‘Let’s try to win all the matches and then we’ll see. Only in the end [of the championship] will we know if it was a successful season.’ (http://www.laroma24.it/rubriche/la-penna-degli-altri/2014/03/carica-garcia-i-conti-li-faccio-solo-alla-fine/)

    1. (ii)

      Il mio è un infortunio lungo e siamo quasi alla fine.

      ‘My injury is a difficult one and we are almost at the end [of the healing period].’ (http://www.corrieredellosport.it/calcio/serie_a/milan/2014/09/29-378316/Montolivo%3A+%C2%ABSono+quasi+pronto+per+tornare+in+campo%C2%BB?print)

  21. Some of the syntactic tests that we apply here to differentiate alla fine as a temporal adverb from the same expression as a marker of ∼TP are used by Lopes (2011) to show that afinal in contemporary EP is not a temporal (circumstantial) adverb; unlike adverbs of the latter kind, afinal cannot occur in contexts that require focus to be placed upon it (Lopes 2011: 134).

  22. An anonymous reviewer points out that French displays a similar distinction between au final (which, like EP afinal, was grammaticalized as an epistemic) and à la fin (which, like no fim, retains a temporal meaning), but also that au final, like Italian alla fine and unlike EP afinal, may be licensed in contexts that allow for a temporal interpretation based on a temporal sequence, like example (19). We leave the analysis of the French data for future research.

  23. Lopes focuses on the relation between the historically prior temporal value of afinal, in which the adverb introduced the final stage of a temporal sequence of events, and the contemporary non-temporal values that are revealed by its discourse uses. The main hypothesis presented in her paper, within a cognitive-functional perspective, is that the contemporary values of afinal would all have developed from the original temporal value, which is seen as prototypical.

  24. In classical theories of contextual update (Stalnaker 1978), such possibilities \(w_{i},\dots,w_{j}\) are the worlds in which the proposition representing the incoming information is false. An anonymous reviewer points out that a notion of belief update and revision akin to our notion of epistemic change has been proposed within dynamic theories of preferential upgrade (e.g. Baltag and Smets 2008). A related proposal in which the reliability of sources is connected to a knowledge update is made by McCready (2014), who establishes a connection between evidentiality and information update.

  25. The choice of language is not relevant here—the same point could be illustrated by taking an example from EP.

  26. Nothing essential in our proposal hinges on the choice of this particular implementation. The reader is referred to Van der Sandt (1992) and Beaver (2001) for other options to implement the presuppositional component of these particles.

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Acknowledgements

We thank three anonymous reviewers, as well as the audiences of the workshop Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles (Como, October 2014) and of the 45th Linguistic Symposium on the Romance Languages (Campinas, May 2015). We would also like to thank Nicholas Asher, Luca Barlassina, Heather Burnett, Basilio Calderone, Julie Hunter, Fabio Montermini and Sandro Zucchi for comments and discussion. Any shortcomings are our own responsibility.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

    Patrícia Amaral

  2. CNRS Laboratory CLLE-ERSS, Toulouse, France

    Fabio Del Prete

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  1. Patrícia Amaral
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Correspondence to Patrícia Amaral.

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Amaral, P., Del Prete, F. On truth unpersistence: At the crossroads of epistemic modality and discourse. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 34, 1135–1165 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-015-9325-5

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