Open AccessVerbs of deception, point of view and polarity
Author(s) -
Jacob Hoeksema
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2021.2
Subject(s) - negation , linguistics , falsity , german , interpretation (philosophy) , complement (music) , object (grammar) , point (geometry) , deception , psychology , philosophy , mathematics , social psychology , biochemistry , chemistry , geometry , complementation , gene , phenotype
The Dutch and German verbs wijsmaken/weismachen 'make wise' have an idiomatic interpretation as verbs of deception 'to fool'. As such, they have the unusual property of being contrafactive (presupposing the falsity of their complement). With second person or generic pronoun subjects, under negation and with future orientation, they are used to express disbelief on the part of the entity denoted by the indirect object. A corpus study shows this secondary use to be especially prominent in Dutch. It depends on the availability of the point of view of experiencer and is most common with first person dative objects.