How Epistemic Modifiers Emerge

How Epistemic Modifiers Emerge PDF Author: Jakob Maché
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110411024
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 602

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Book Description
This book delivers the first comprehensive study on German modal verbs which summarises and critically reflects the discussion of the last 500 years, checks these findings against large corpus data and is accessible to the English reader. It is shown that non-epistemic modal verbs modify events, whereas their epistemic counterparts modify the proposition, and how the latter developed from the former.

How Epistemic Modifiers Emerge

How Epistemic Modifiers Emerge PDF Author: Jakob Maché
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110411024
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 602

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Book Description
This book delivers the first comprehensive study on German modal verbs which summarises and critically reflects the discussion of the last 500 years, checks these findings against large corpus data and is accessible to the English reader. It is shown that non-epistemic modal verbs modify events, whereas their epistemic counterparts modify the proposition, and how the latter developed from the former.

How Epistemic Modifiers Emerge

How Epistemic Modifiers Emerge PDF Author: Jakob Maché
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110411121
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 694

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Book Description
This book delivers the first comprehensive study on German modal verbs which summarises and critically reflects the discussion of the last 500 years, checks these findings against large corpus data and is accessible to the English reader. It is shown that non-epistemic modal verbs modify events, whereas their epistemic counterparts modify the proposition, and how the latter developed from the former.

Evidential Marking in European Languages

Evidential Marking in European Languages PDF Author: Björn Wiemer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110726076
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 749

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Book Description
How are evidential functions distinguished by means other than grammatical paradigms, i.e. by function words and other lexical units? And how inventories of such means can be compared across languages (against an account also of grammatical means used to mark information source)? This book presents an attempt at supplying a comparative survey of such inventories by giving detailed “evidential profiles” for a large part of European languages: Continental Germanic, English, French, Basque, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Modern Greek, and Ibero-Romance languages, such as Catalán, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish. Each language is treated in a separate chapter, and their profiles are based on a largely unified set of concepts based on function and/or etymological provenance. The profiles are preceded by a chapter which clarifies the theoretical premises and methodological background for the format followed in the profiles. The concluding chapter presents a synthesis of findings from these profiles, including areal biases and the formulation of methodological problems that call for further research.

Cyclical Change Continued

Cyclical Change Continued PDF Author: Elly van Gelderen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 902726743X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
This book presents new data and additional questions regarding the linguistic cycle. The topics discussed are the pronoun, negative, negative existential, analytic-synthetic, distributive, determiner, degree, and future/modal cycles. The papers raise questions about the length of time that cycles take, the interactions between different cycles, the typical stages and their stability, and the areal factors influencing cycles. The languages and language families that are considered in depth are Central Pomo, Cherokee, Chinese, English, French, Gbe, German, Hmong-Mien, Maipurean, Mayan, Mohawk, Mon-Khmer, Niger-Congo, Nupod, Quechuan, Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai , Tuscarora, Ute, and Yoruboid. One paper covers several of the world’s language families. Cyclical change connects linguists working in various frameworks because it is exciting to find a reason behind this fascinating phenomenon.

Clause Structure and Word Order in the History of German

Clause Structure and Word Order in the History of German PDF Author: Agnes Jäger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198813546
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
This volume presents the first comprehensive generative account of the historical syntax of German. Leading scholars in the field survey a range of topics and offer new insights into multiple central aspects of clause structure and word order, including verb placement, adverbial connectives, pronominal syntax, and information-structural factors.

Certainty-uncertainty – and the Attitudinal Space in Between

Certainty-uncertainty – and the Attitudinal Space in Between PDF Author: Sibilla Cantarini
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027269149
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
The selected papers of this volume cover five main topics, namely ‘Certainty: The conceptual differential’; ‘(Un)Certainty as attitudinality’; ‘Dialogical exchange and speech acts’; ‘Onomasiology’; and ‘Applications in exegesis and religious discourse’. By examining the general theme of the communication of certainty and uncertainty from different scientific fields, theoretical approaches and perspectives, this compendium of state-of-the-art research papers provides both an interdisciplinary comparison of the latest investigations, methods and findings, and new advances and theoretical insights with a common focus on human communication.

Micro-change and Macro-change in Diachronic Syntax

Micro-change and Macro-change in Diachronic Syntax PDF Author: Eric Mathieu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191065021
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
The chapters in this volume address the process of syntactic change at different granularities. The language-particular component of a grammar is now usually assumed to be nothing more than the specification of the grammatical properties of a set of lexical items. Accordingly, grammar change must reduce to lexical change. And yet these micro-changes can cumulatively alter the typological character of a language (a macro-change). A central puzzle in diachronic syntax is how to relate macro-changes to micro-changes. Several chapters in this volume describe specific micro-changes: changes in the syntactic properties of a particular lexical item or class of lexical items. Other chapters explore links between micro-change and macro-change, using devices such as grammar competition at the individual and population level, recurring diachronic pathways, and links between acquisition biases and diachronic processes. This book is therefore a great companion to the recent literature on the micro- versus macro-approaches to parameters in synchronic syntax. One of its important contributions is the demonstration of how much we can learn about synchronic linguistics through the way languages change: the case studies included provide diachronic insight into many syntactic constructions that have been the target of extensive recent synchronic research, including tense, aspect, relative clauses, stylistic fronting, verb second, demonstratives, and negation. Languages discussed include several archaic and contemporary Romance and Germanic varieties, as well as Greek, Hungarian, and Chinese, among many others.

Re-Assessing Modalising Expressions

Re-Assessing Modalising Expressions PDF Author: Pascal Hohaus
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027260524
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Mood, modality and evidentiality are popular and dynamic areas in linguistics. Re-Assessing Modalising Expressions – Categories, co-text, and context focuses on the specific issue of the ways language users express permission, obligation, volition (intention), possibility and ability, necessity and prediction linguistically. Using a range of evidence and corpus data collected from different sources, the authors of this volume examine the distribution and functions of a range of patterns involving modalising expressions as predominantly found in standard American English, British English or Hong Kong English, but also in Japanese. The authors are particularly interested in addressing (co-)textual manifestations of modalising expressions as well as their distribution across different text-types and thus filling a gap research was unable to plug in the past. Thoughts on categorising or re-categorising modalising expressions initiate and complement a multi-perspectival enterprise that is intended to bring research in this area a step forward.

On Black Magic

On Black Magic PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description


Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality in Spanish (Semi-)Auxiliaries

Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality in Spanish (Semi-)Auxiliaries PDF Author: Bert Cornillie
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110204487
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
This volume presents a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the Spanish evidential semi-auxiliaries parecer and resultar, the modal constructions with amenazar and prometer, and the modal auxiliaries poder, deber and tener que. These verbs have never been considered together in a global approach that transcends the classical "verbal periphrases" model. The book proposes a cognitive-functional account of evidentiality and modality in Spanish with special attention to subjectivity and grounding. The theoretical reflection relies on empirical evidence of two sorts: synchronic and diachronic corpus-analyses alternate with tests that measure the semantic and pragmatic compatibility of the evidential and epistemic constructions with specific sentences. Following the assumption that linguistic forms are determined by their meaning, the array of constructions that characterizes the different verbs justifies their grouping in three pairs of (semi-)auxiliaries: parecer vs resultar, amenazar vs prometer and poder vs deber/tener que. The distributional differences observed in the corpus are further shown to correlate with different degrees of grammaticalization. Primarily intended for scholars working in the field of Spanish functional linguistics, the monograph is also relevant for grammaticalization studies and for cognitive-semantic research at large. Given its combined theoretical and applied character, the volume is also of interest to anyone concerned with syntactic processes, lexical semantics or the wider area of discourse analysis and pragmatics.