• 한국언어정보학회지:언어와정보
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• 제17권1호
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• pp.33-52
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• 2013

Some sentential adverbials in English, especially those which introduce evidentiality (hereafter evidential adverbials), such as apparently, purportedly, reportedly, and allegedly, exhibit what we call 'the perspective shift' in interrogatives: they are interpreted from the speaker's perspective in declaratives, but are interpreted from the addressee's perspective in interrogatives. To account for this phenomenon, we argue that English evidential adverbials are functions taking a proposition as its argument and returns a character in the sense of Kaplan (1989). We further show that, with this assumption, the perspective shift of evidential adverbials in interrogatives can be explained within the rather standard semantics of interrogatives (Hamblin 1973, among others) and of indexicals (Kaplan 1989).