Seem: Evidential, Epistemic, or What Else? A Study in Cognitive Semantics

摘要

This paper, firmly anchored in the framework of Leonard Talmy's cognitive semantics, reconstructs a core semantics of the English verb seem, which is considered a central instantiation of the schematic system of cognitive state. This 'new' semantics is meant to overcome the indecisiveness of recent accounts how to categorize seem (and its equivalents in other European languages): either as evidential or as epistemic or as both, and concomitantly identifying the meaning of seem with the meaning of the various constructions of which it is a constituent. To this end, the semantics of seem is here associated with Talmy's concept of the comparison frame, which places alternative conceptualizations of a situation within a single frame. In the case of seem, these alternatives are either 'fictive' or 'factive', juxtaposed in an ambiguous figure-ground configuration, which may be disambiguated by what in Talmy's ongoing research on the attention system in language is called non-dedicated lexical triggers (like really, just, merely, only). Conceived of as an incentive for further investigations of how schematic systems are 'recruited' to integrate, the paper at the same time testifies to the explanatory power of Talmy's Overlapping Systems Model of Cognitive Organization.