Modality And Grammar

Author : Joan L. Bybee
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027229252
Total Pages : 585 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modality in Grammar and Discourse written by Joan L. Bybee and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers that look into the expression of modality in the grammars of natural languages, with an emphasis on its manifestations in naturally occurring discourse. Though the individual contributions reflect a diversity of languages, of synchronic and diachronic foci, and of theoretical orientations — all within the broad domain of functional linguistics — they nonetheless converge around a number of key issues: the relationship between 'mood' and 'modality'; the delineation of modal categories and their nomenclature; the grounding of modality in interactive discourse; the elusive category 'irrealis'; and the relationship of modal notions and categories to other categories of grammar.

Author : Martin Hilpert
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027259003
Total Pages : 259 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modality and Diachronic Construction Grammar written by Martin Hilpert and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores how Diachronic Construction Grammar can shed new light on changes in a central and well-researched domain of grammar, namely modality. Its main goal is to show how constructional analyses can help us address some of the long-standing questions that have informed discussions of modal expressions and their development, and to illustrate the processes that are involved in these developments on the basis of data from languages such as English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, and Japanese. The studies in this volume are organized around three interrelated topics. The first of these concerns the organization of modal constructions in a network. A second focus area of the studies in this volume concerns the developmental pathways that modal constructions follow diachronically. The third topic that ties the contributions of this volume together is the contrast between constructionalization and constructional change.

Author : Joan Bybee
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226086658
Total Pages : 420 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Evolution of Grammar written by Joan Bybee and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-11-15 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect, and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages. Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language states. The Evolution of Grammar has important implications for the development of language and for the study of cognitive processes in general.

Author : Elisabeth Leiss
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027270791
Total Pages : 519 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modes of Modality written by Elisabeth Leiss and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-01-15 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume aims at a universal definition of modality or “illocutionary/speaker’s perspective force” that is strong enough to capture the entire range of different subtypes and varieties of modalities in different languages. The central idea is that modality is all-pervasive in language. This perspective on modality allows for the integration of covert modality as well as peripheral instances of modality in neglected domains such as the modality of insufficieny, of attitudinality, or neglected domains such as modality and illocutionary force in finite vs. nonfinite and factive vs. non-factive subordinated clauses. In most languages, modality encompasses modal verbs both in their root and epistemic meanings, at least where these languages have the principled distribution between root and epistemic modality in the first place (which is one fundamentally restricted, in its strict qualitative and quantitative sense, to the Germanic languages). In addition, this volume discusses one other intricate and partially highly mysterious class of modality triggers: modal particles as they are sported in the Germanic languages (except for English). It is argued in the contributions and the languages discussed in this volume how modal verbs and adverbials, next to modal particles, are expressed, how they are interlinked with contextual factors such as aspect, definiteness, person, verbal factivity, and assertivity as opposed to other attitudinal types. An essential concept used and argued for is perspectivization (a sub-concept of possible world semantics). Language groups covered in detail and compared are Slavic, Germanic, and South East Asian. The volume will interest researchers in theoretical and applied linguistics, typology, the semantics/pragmatics interface, and language philosophy as it is part of a larger project developing an alternative approach to Universal Grammar that is compatible with functionalist approaches.

Author : F.R. Palmer
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317900928
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modality and the English Modals written by F.R. Palmer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed account of the many uses and functions of these verbs. The nature of modality, and some controversial issues, are also discussed.

Author : Raphael Salkie
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
ISBN 13 : 3110196344
Total Pages : 391 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modality in English written by Raphael Salkie and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Main description: This volume presents strongly empirical, corpus-based studies of a range of English modal auxiliaries and modal constructions in specific uses. It also approaches some of the classic issues in the field of modality from new perspectives, notably that of the 'Theory of Enunciative Operations' developed by the French linguist Antoine Culioli and his colleagues.

Author : Jóhanna Barðdal
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027268614
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Diachronic Construction Grammar written by Jóhanna Barðdal and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Construction Grammar as a framework offers a new perspective on traditional historical questions in diachronic linguistics and language change: how do new constructions arise, how should competition in diachronic variation be accounted for, how do constructions fall into disuse, and how do constructions change in general, formally and/or semantically, and with what implications for the language system as a whole? This volume offers a broad introduction to the confluence of Construction Grammar and historical syntax, and also detailed case studies of various instances of syntactic change modeled within Construction Grammar. The volume demonstrates that Construction Grammar as a theory is particularly well suited for modeling historical changes in morphosyntax, and it also documents challenging new phenomena that require a theoretical account within any competing framework of syntactic change.

Author : Jacqueline Guéron
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 1402083548
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Time and Modality written by Jacqueline Guéron and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-07-27 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a unique work of reference. Not only does it unite studies which explore the syntax and semantics of tense or modality, but it is the first book of its kind to embrace the interaction of tense and modality within a coherent generative model.

Author : Jan Nuyts
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191646342
Total Pages : 640 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Modality and Mood written by Jan Nuyts and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook offers an in depth and comprehensive state of the art survey of the linguistic domains of modality and mood. An international team of experts in the field examine the full range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the many facets of the phenomena involved. Following an opening section that provides an introduction and historical background to the topic, the volume is divided into five parts. Parts 1 and 2 present the basic linguistic facts about the systems of modality and mood in the languages of the world, covering the semantics and the expression of different subtypes of modality and mood respectively. The authors also examine the interaction of modality and mood, mutually and with other semantic categories such as aspect, time, negation, and evidentiality. In Part 3, authors discuss the features of the modality and mood systems in five typologically different language groups, while chapters in Part 4 deal with wider perspectives on modality and mood: diachrony, areality, first language acquisition, and sign language. Finally, Part 5 looks at how modality and mood are handled in different theoretical approaches: formal syntax, functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics and construction grammar, and formal semantics.

Author : Jackie Nordstrom
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027205833
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modality and Subordinators written by Jackie Nordstrom and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book connects two linguistic phenomena, modality and subordinators, so that both are seen in a new light, each adding to the understanding of the other. It argues that general subordinators (or complementizers) denote propositional modality (otherwise expressed by moods such as the indicative-subjunctive and epistemic-evidential modal markers). The book explores the hypothesis both on a cross-linguistic and on a language-branch specific level (the Germanic languages). One obvious connection between the indicative-subjunctive distinction and subordinators is that the former is typically manifested in subordinate clauses. Furthermore, both the indicative-subjunctive and subordinators determine clause types. More importantly, however, it is shown, through data from various languages, that subordinators themselves often denote the indicative-subjunctive distinction. In the Germanic languages, there is variation in many clause types between both the indicative and the subjunctive and "that" and "if "depending on the speaker s and/or the subject s certainty of the truth of the proposition."