Abstrakt
The paper provides a thorough description of Czech relative clauses introduced by the complementizer jak 'how'. We argue that jak-relatives convey an evidential implication, whereby the speaker expects the hearer to have evidence that the predicate-type denotation of the relative clause truthfully applies to its referential head.
For instance, "the man how smoked" implies that the hearer has evidence that the man smoked. We further argue that the evidential implication is a conventional implicature in the sense of Potts (2005) - it cannot be semantically embedded, the relative clause cannot be headed by quantificational heads, and cannot contain expressions semantically dependent on matrix operators.
At the same time, jak-relatives appear to be able to be arguments of so-called recognitional demonstratives. Counter to Potts' basic assumption, jak-relatives exhibit the paradoxical behavior of commenting on the relative clause head while being able to co-determine its extension.
