Spelling out the Obvious: Latin quidem and the Expression of Presuppositional Polarity

35 Pages·2017·0.61 MB·English

by  Lieven Danckaert

Spelling out the Obvious: Latin quidem and the
Expression of Presuppositional Polarity
Lieven Danckaert
To cite this version:
Lieven Danckaert. Spelling out the Obvious: Latin quidem and the Expression of Presuppositional
Polarity. JournalofHistoricalPragmatics,2015,16(1),pp.109-141. ￿10.1075/jhp.16.1.05dan￿. ￿halshs-
01526869￿
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Spelling out the Obvious
:
Latin quidem and the Expression of Presuppositional Polarity
Lieven Danckaert
Ghent University
In Danckaert (2013), the Latin particle quidem was analysed as a marker of emphatic
affirmative polarity. Building on this proposal, the present paper elaborates on the
pragmatic properties of this element. It is argued that quidem is not a neutral but a so-
called ‘presuppositional’ polarity marker, which confirms a proposition which (i) is
already part of the common ground but (ii) was not overtly spelled out in the
(immediately) preceding context. In more formal terms, I propose that quidem gives
rise to the conventional implicature that the speaker assumes that the content of his
message might already by known to the addressee, or that it conveys information that
the latter expects to hear or read. As such, quidem can be considered a “lexical marker
of common ground”, in the sense of Fetzer and Fischer (2007).

Keywords: presuppositional polarity, grounding, discourse markers, Latin,
conventional implicatures
1. Introduction: getting to know quidem
This study is concerned with the Latin discourse marker quidem, a notoriously versatile
element which in English is variously translated as ‘indeed’, ‘certainly’, ‘in fact’ or
‘admittedly’. Despite having received quite some attention in the recent (and less recent)
literature (see esp. Solodow’s 1978 monograph), the meaning and function of quidem
remain until today ill-understood. The main aim of this paper is to elucidate under which
pragmatic conditions quidem can be used felicitously. Before starting the discussion, I first
2 Lieven Danckaert
give a brief overview of two recent treatments of quidem, one proposed by Kroon (2004,
2005, 2009, 2011), and one by Danckaert (2013).
1.1 Kroon (2004, 2005, 2009, 2011): Quidem as a discourse structuring particle
The bottom line of Kroon’s approach to quidem is that the particle’s main function is to
structure the discourse. Against the backdrop of a framework that assumes that longer
stretches of discourse can be decomposed into smaller units which do not necessarily
correspond to single syntactic units (say sentences or clauses), quidem is argued to signal
that a given discourse unit is autonomous, but that it does not on its own constitute a
complete, self-contained piece of information. Under this view, quidem explicitly
articulates the discourse not only by setting apart a unit from its surrounding context, but
also by linking it to another unit, which can either follow or precede the quidem-unit.
Kroon distinguishes three levels of analysis, viz., acts, moves and (in interactional
contexts) exchanges. To illustrate this system, consider the short exchange in (1), from
Kroon (2011, 183):
(1) Speaker 1: I have to go home. So let’s make a new appointment.
Speaker 2: But it’s only ten o’clock!
The hierarchical discourse structure of this fragment can be represented as in (2):
(2) I have to go home. act
1
move
1
So let’s make a new appointment. act
2

exchange
But it’s only ten o’clock! move
2
In the present context, the most interesting aspect of this analysis is the fact that the two
sentences uttered by Speaker 1 together constitute one single (but complex) discourse
move, consisting of two separate discourse acts. Kroon (2001, 185-186) suggests that
quidem occurs in a discourse act which is part of a complex discourse move. More
particularly:
[...] the particle quidem [...] indicates that its host unit is informationally not complete and
needs, for its proper interpretation, another piece of information with which it forms a
conceptual whole [...]. Signalling conceptual incompleteness, as quidem does, seems
especially opportune when the component parts of the conceptual whole are divided over
separate communicative units, as is the case in example [(3)]:
Spelling out the Obvious: Latin quidem and Presuppositional Polarity 3
(3) consul[...] suos quidem a fuga reuocauit; act
1
move
ipse [...] missilitraiectuscecidit. act
2
‘the consul did indeed rally his men from their flight; but he himself ... fell struck
with a javelin’ (= Liv. 41.18.11)1
In this example quoted by Kroon, the description of the consul’s two actions consists of
two discourse acts, which together constitute a single-but-complex move. In Kroon’s
analysis, the occurrence of quidem in the first act signals the fact that the end of this clause
does not coincide with the end of the larger move, but that additional information will be
supplied to complete this first message.
Perhaps the most novel aspect of Kroon’s approach to quidem is the fact that she does
not assume the particle to be endowed with any semantic content. Put differently, the fact
that quidem in (3) is translated as ‘indeed’ is not to be taken to reflect an inherent property
of quidem. Rather, the way this element is rendered in modern translations is variable and
largely context-bound, whereas the sole core property of quidem is its discourse-structuring
function.
It is not clear however whether Kroon’s analysis is tenable. For instance, in the
particular case of (3), it is questionable whether quidem is at all needed to signal the tight
bond between the two described events. One could argue that this relationship is
sufficiently established (i) by the fact that two “acts” share the same subject (viz., the
consul)2, (ii) as well as by the contrast between suos ‘his men’ and ipse ‘(he) himself’,
which belong to one and the same reference set (‘the set of all Roman soldiers taking part
in the battle against the Ligurians’). In addition, there is evidence that the lexical entry of
quidem does in fact contain a semantic component, and by this token, that the function of
quidem is not (purely) discourse-organizational. First, it is standardly assumed that quidem
is a focus particle, which does more than structure the discourse.3 Second, it has recently
been claimed that quidem also denotes (emphatic) affirmative polarity: this last point was
proposed by Danckaert (2013), whose account is summarized in the following section.
1.2 Danckaert (2013)
As a starting point Danckaert (2013) takes the standard assumption that quidem is somehow
‘emphatic’ (see for instance Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. quidem: ‘particularizing and
emphasizing a preceding word or phrase’; Solodow [1978, 13]: ‘quidem essentially
emphasizes’). Translating this intuition into modern linguistic terms, one can say that
quidem is a focus particle.4 In addition, and departing from the communis opinio, I make
4 Lieven Danckaert
two novel claims, namely (i) that syntactically, quidem always is a propositional focus
operator rather than a particle inducing constituent focus, and (ii) that the basic semantic
value of quidem is one of emphatic (focal) affirmative polarity. As the present paper is
mainly concerned with the meaning rather than with the syntactic behaviour of quidem,
here I will only elaborate on the claim that quidem is a polarity item.
In the languages of the world, there is a well known discrepancy between negative
and affirmative polarity, in that the latter, unlike the former, is usually not expressed by
means of overt morphology (Horn 2001: Chapter 3). This contrast is illustrated in (4a–b):
(4) a. John did not kiss Mary. negative polarity: overt
b. John kissed Mary. regular affirmative polarity: covert
c. John DID Kiss Mary. emphatic affirmative polarity: overt
However, as shown in (4c), some expressions of affirmative polarity are in fact encoded
overtly: these cases typically involve some type of emphatic affirmation rather than a
neutral assertion. Danckaert (2013) suggests that quidem is such a marker of emphatic
affirmative polarity. This claim ties in with (but is clearly distinct from) the standard view
which says that quidem is a pure focus marker (Adams 1994; Spevak 2010).
Examples like (5), in which quidem is contrastively juxtaposed to non ‘not’,
constitute a first piece of evidence in favour of the view that quidem is a polarity item. In
this example, quidem indicates that the event expressed in its host clause did happen, in
contrast with the event in the following clause, which did not (cf. non) happen:
(5) Eum uero, qui telum quidem miserit, sed non uulnerauerit, correptum rotatumque
sternit nec uulnerat.
‘He got hold of any man who threw a missile at him without actually wounding him,
he swung him around but did not wound him.’ (= Plin. Nat. 8.51)
Assuming that the opposite of negation is affirmation, it seems logical to conclude that
quidem in (5) encodes affirmative polarity. A second piece of evidence for this conclusion
comes from a specific syntactic environment in which quidem frequently occurs, namely
the construction called “epitaxis” in Rosén (2008). An example is given in (6):
(6) Decessit Corellius Rufus et quidem sponte.
‘Corellius Rufus has died, and he did so by his own wish.’ (Plin. Ep. 1.12.1)
The phenomenon of epitaxis involves coordination of two sentences, the second of which is
partially elided and only contains a sentence-modifying particle (optionally) and a single
focalized constituent (obligatorily). Crucially, in the syntactic literature it has been claimed
that this optional particle typically encodes affirmative or negative polarity (Merchant
Spelling out the Obvious: Latin quidem and Presuppositional Polarity 5
2003; Winkler 2005).5 Finally, from the fact that quidem frequently co-occurs with modal
adverbs like certe, sane and profecto, it was concluded in Danckaert (2013) that quidem
does not have any modal force.
1.3 Outline of the upcoming analysis
In what follows, I adopt the syntactic and semantic proposals concerning the scope and the
polar force of quidem made in Danckaert (2013). The main aim of this paper is to
supplement these proposals by investigating in which pragmatic contexts quidem can be
used felicitously.6 Recall that I am assuming that quidem is a propositional operator.
Throughout the paper, I will refer to the proposition that functions as the argument of such
operators as the operator’s “prejacent”. The research question addressed thus concerns the
pragmatic status of the prejacent of quidem.
The core idea is that quidem gives rise to what Grice (1975) called a “conventional
implicature”, i.e., a non-cancellable implicature which is automatically generated whenever
a given lexical item is used. As I will argue in sections 4 and 5, the nature of this
implicature is related to the information status of the proposition modified by quidem. To
be more precise, I take quidem to signal that a given proposition is part of the common
ground without having been uttered explicitly in the (immediately) previous discourse. This
makes quidem a member of the class of so-called “presuppositional” polarity markers,
which at a pragmatic level mainly function as a grounding device.7
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In section 2, I offer some general
background, focusing on issues of information structure at the level of the entire
proposition. Next, I introduce the phenomenon of presuppositional polarity (section 3). I
then turn to the actual analysis of quidem. In a first stage (section 4), I look at collocation
patterns where quidem co-occurs with an element that overtly signals that a given
proposition is hearer-old information. Finally, in section 5 I discuss a number of examples
where no such additional element is present, but where the discourse status of the
proposition modified by quidem can be deduced from the surrounding context.
2. Felicity conditions on the use of focal and polar expressions
As a starting point, I take the observation that not all propositions can be uttered felicitously
without some amount of contextualization, i.e., in a so-called “out-of-the-blue” situation.
Interestingly, both polarity markers and foci are known to be pragmatically odd when used
at the very beginning of a conversation. The goal of this section is to determine the
pragmatic status of the proposition associated with a focal or polar expression.
6 Lieven Danckaert
2.1 Background: what can be uttered out-of-the-blue?
Consider first the examples in (7) (taken from Horn 2001, 71–72, who refers to Ducrot
1973 and Givón 1978):
(7) a. My wife is pregnant.
b. My wife is not pregnant.
The affirmative statement in (7a) can be uttered without too much context: if a man enters a
room and communicates the happy news in (7a), it is likely that he will just be met with
congratulations. In contrast, (7b) is odd at best when used to open a conversation: likely
reactions include “Oh, but was she supposed to?” or “I didn’t know that you were planning
to have a baby”. Intuitively, this negative statement seems to require some previous
mention about (the possibility of) the speaker’s wife being pregnant.
Focus behaves very much like negation. For instance, only the neutral utterance in
(8a) requires no special contextualization. Examples containing a focalized constituent, like
the OSV-clause in (8b) and the object cleft in (8c), are much less felicitous without some
previous mention of John and his kissing somebody else than Mary (whence the #-sign):
(8) a. You know what? John just kissed Mary!
b. # You know what? MARY John just kissed!
c. # You know what? It’s Mary that John just kissed!
A perhaps somewhat more realistic illustration can be given with a “real life” example. The
following short exchange is taken from Birner and Ward (1998, 33):
(9) Customer: Can I get a bagel?
Waitress: No, sorry. We’re out of bagels. A bran muffin I can give you.
In the waitress’ reply, the direct object a bran muffin appears in a non-canonical, fronted
position. In order for this word order pattern to be felicitous, a context is needed in which
the preposed element is part of a set of comparable items, one of which has already been
mentioned in the previous discourse.8 In the muffin example, a preposed direct object is
pragmatically odd without any mention of any other baked breakfast good with which
muffins can be contrasted:
(10) Customer: I’m not sure what I should have for breakfast. What’s on offer today?
Waitress: # A bran muffin I can give you.
(cid:1) I can give you a bran muffin.
Spelling out the Obvious: Latin quidem and Presuppositional Polarity 7
Other marked word order patterns are associated with different felicity conditions, but the
principle is always the same: out-of-the-blue contexts typically prefer the canonical
“discourse neutral” word order.
To return to Latin quidem, recall that this particle is assumed to have both polar and
focal force. We therefore predict that quidem can only operate on propositions which do not
convey brand new information. As will be shown below, this prediction is indeed borne
out: quidem typically modifies a proposition which is already part of the common ground.
Importantly however, as has repeatedly been observed in the literature, not all propositions
in the common ground have the same pragmatic status. Thus Fetzer and Fischer (2007, 1):
Recent research has shown that the content of utterances cannot be assumed to enter the
common ground only because of the fact that they are being mentioned. Rather, grounding
is a complex, sophisticated mechanism in which minimal signals play key roles [...].
In other words, some propositions are part of the common ground by virtue of the fact that
they have been uttered explicitly, whereas others aren’t: the latter are merely “inferable”.
As will be argued at length in sections 4 and 5, in the particular case of quidem there
appears to be a special requirement saying that this proposition be not explicitly mentioned
in the immediately preceding context.
2.2 The discourse status of propositions
In a seminal paper, Prince (1981) proposes a taxonomy of old and given information, which
is later elaborated by Prince (1986, 1992), Birner (1997, 2006a,b) and Birner and Ward
(1998). These studies mainly concentrate on the pragmatics of noun phrases. Works
devoted to possible information states of propositions include Dryer (1996) (on focal
operators) and Kaiser (2004) (on propositions containing a marker of emphatic polarity).
Fully conscious of the fact that more fine-grained distinctions can be made, I will assume
that old information comes in two kinds, namely old information that has been mentioned
explicitly, and old information that hasn’t. The former I will call “discourse-old”, the latter
“hearer-old”. This yields three different types of information status: (i) discourse-old
information, (ii) hearer-old information and (iii) brand new information. This is
summarized in Table 1:

Table 1: Three types of information status
OLD NEW
(is already part of the common (updates the
common ground)
8 Lieven Danckaert
ground when uttered)
discourse-old hearer-old brand new

I will now have a closer look at the properties of these three categories. Since this paper is
concerned with the information status of propositions, I will leave aside the discourse status
of noun phrases.
Propositions that convey brand new information (“all focus sentences”) update the
common ground with information which has not explicitly been mentioned earlier, and
cannot be inferred from anything that has been said. As we saw earlier (section 2.1), they
typically exhibit the so-called discourse neutral or canonical word order.
In contrast, discourse-old propositions have been uttered explicitly in the previous
discourse. An example of a proposition that is typically discourse-old is the prejacent of a
polarity reversing marker of emphatic polarity (of the type briefly mentioned in section
1.2.2). For instance, the Dutch contrastive affirmative particle wel requires its prejacent to
be discourse-old:
(11) A: Jan heeft Repelsteeltje niet gezien.
‘Jan didn’t see Rumpelstiltkin.’
B: Niet waar! Jan heeft Repelsteeltje wel gezien.
‘That’s not true! Jan DID see Rumpelstiltkin.’
The third and final category is the most interesting one for our purposes. Above, the
common ground was defined as a set of propositions shared by both speaker and hearer.
However, there are good reasons to assume that this definition is subject to contextual
restrictions: not all propositions known or believed by speaker and hearer are always
present in the common ground in every single conversation between the two speakers
involved. Imagine for instance a situation in which John and Mary talk about a game of
football, say Manchester United - Chelsea. Imagine furthermore that both John and Mary
know that Rome is the capital of Italy. Despite the fact that this latter proposition qualifies
as shared knowledge, it is quite unlikely that the proposition ‘Rome is the capital of Italy’ is
part of the common ground while John and Mary discuss the abovementioned football
game. However, this state of affairs can easily change, for instance when the discussion
shifts from the English Premier League to the upcoming World Cup, to be held in Italy. Bill
had told Mary a couple of weeks earlier that he was considering to buy tickets for a game of
the English national team, which is set to take place in Rome. Mary now asks John about
his plans:
(12) Mary: Weren’t you planning to buy tickets for a match in Rome?
Spelling out the Obvious: Latin quidem and Presuppositional Polarity 9
John: No, I changed my mind. Capitals are too expensive. I got tickets for a
game in Naples in the end.
From this little exchange, it becomes clear that both John and Mary know that Rome is the
capital of Italy. However, at no point this was mentioned explicitly. Still, it seems to be part
of the common ground. Crucially, it only enters the common ground when the topic of
conversation changes from the national football competition to the championship in Italy.
In other words, at some point the relevant proposition is “activated” (in Dryer’s 1996
sense), presumably through some process of associative inference (Ariel 1989). In the
remainder of this paper, I will refer to propositions that enter the common ground without
having been uttered explicitly as “hearer-old” propositions (borrowing Prince’s 1992
terminology).
Before we proceed, it is important to point out that the picture presented in Table 1 is
only an idealization. In reality, the typology of given and old information is presumably
much more fine-grained (see Dryer 1996). Having provided a rough typology of possible
information states of propositions, I now turn to a special class of polarity markers, which

is very selective as to the pragmatic properties of their prejacent.
3. Introducing presuppositional polarity
In this section, I introduce a class of emphatic polarity markers which require their
prejacent to be hearer-old (i.e., be part of the common ground, but not mentioned explicitly
in the preceding stretch of discourse). In the literature, polarity markers that are subject to
this special felicity condition are usually called “presuppositional” (perhaps a bit
unfortunately so). In the following sections, I illustrate this phenomenon with some
examples from Italian, Spanish and German. Additional literature can be found in Zanuttini
(1997, 67–84, on a number of Northern Italian dialects), Schwenter (2003, 2005, on
Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese respectively) and Kaiser (2004, on Finnish).
3.1 Some case studies
An example of a negative presuppositional element is the Italian negative particle mica,
which is discussed in detail in Cinque (1991 [1976]). mica either co-occurs with non, the
neutral marker of sentential negation in Italian (as in (13a), from Cinque 1991 [1976], 314–
315), or it appears on its own (13b):
(13) a. Non è mica freddo, qua dentro.
‘It is not cold in here.’