Conférence – 11H – MSHS – Salle Plate
Lien visio : https://univ-cotedazur.zoom.us/j/84205271016?pwd=3YMqqgGp1TuCaIM2cXiXOHBfZetplh.1
Gillian Ramchand, Professeur à l’université d’Oxford
In Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, the past tense is preferentially used in making value judgements of the following kind, where English would require the present.
Dette var gott!
This was good
“This is delicious!’’
While this construction is anecdotally well known, it has so far eluded formal syntactic or semantic analysis. It has variously been described as `subjective’ (Kjederkvist 1898) and `mirative’ (Larm 2015 ) in the literature. I argue that this construction is neither an exclamative nor a subjective predication, but propose an analysis of the use of the past tense in this construction instead as a report of recent experience which makes use of the notion of `witness events’ for a particular stative situational description.
