Abstract
Cross-linguistically we find epistemic indefinites,1 existential determiners that signal ignorance on the part of the speaker. Some such indefinites are German irgendein (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002, Kratzer 2005, Aloni and Port forthcoming), English some (Becker 1999, Farkas 2002b), Spanish algún (Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito 2003, 2008, 2010) and Romanian vreun (Farkas 2002a, 2006, Fӑlӑuş 2009, 2011). Consider, as illustration, the Spanish sentence in (1) below. By using algun, the speaker signals that she cannot identify the doctor that Maria married. As a result, the namely continuation, which identifies the doctor in question, is distinctly odd.
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© 2013 Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Paula Menéndez-Benito
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Alonso-Ovalle, L., Menéndez-Benito, P. (2013). A Note on the Derivation of the Epistemic Effect of Spanish Algún as an Implicature. In: Fӑlӑuş, A. (eds) Alternatives in Semantics. Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317247_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317247_2
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