Yuya Okawa (Kyoto University) will give a ling lunch talk at 12:30 Nov. 13, 2012 in Oak 338, UConn. The title of his talk is “Inference and Japanese evidentials”.

“Evidentials is a morpheme which specifies the sort of information or indicates its existence. Some of Japanese evidentials are so called inferential evidentials, that is, morphemes which indicate not only the existence of the sort of information but also the speaker’s inference from it. Now, there is observation that Japanese inferential evidentials can involve abduction or induction, but not involve deductive inference. In this talk, I will specify their features through this observation and give a tentative formalization to analyze them.”