In this lecture we have a closer look at confirmationals (there is so much to cover)

Here are the slides

There are a few topics we are covering

i) Confirmationals in Atayal. We will look more closely at another East Asian language: Atayal which (like Chinese) illustrates a system that exploits the full range of expected confirmationals.

ii) The mechanism of valuation. We’ll explore how exactly valuation happens: I argue that we don’t need features, but that instead either the meaning or the sound can serve to value [ucoin]. This will also lead us to investigate a little more closely how intonation is integrated into syntactic structure. You will then have an opportunity to check out if and how intonation plays a role in your language

iii) More parameters of variation. Finally, we will explore more languages (Medumba and Northern Mandarin) and we’ll see that there are more parameters of variation associated with confirmationals. They can differ regarding the source as well as the strength of the belief that’s encoded.