'Omen'ek esan nahi omen duenaz

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the meaning and use of the Basque reportative particle 'omen'. We want to show that, contrary to what most Basque dictionaries and grammars suggest, beyond i-ts reportative aspect, the meaning of 'omen' does not include neither (i) the evidential meaning that would make it synonymous with the particle 'bide' nor (ii) the expression of doubt or uncertainty about the truth of the proposition on which 'omen' operates. We will also try to account for the particular behavior of 'omen' as a reportative particle.

To deal with these issues, we will make use of basic tene-ts of contemporary semantics and pragmatics, distinguishing among the meaning of sentences containing 'omen', the content(s) of utterances of those sentences, and the eventual conversational implicatures generated by those utterances. We will also briefly compare our view with Faller's (2002) speech-act theoretic account of a similar particle in Cuzco Quechua.