Modality Aspect Interfaces

Author : Werner Abraham
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027229929
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modality-aspect Interfaces written by Werner Abraham and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main topics pursued in this volume are based on empirical insights derived from Germanic: logical and typological dispositions about aspect-modality links. These are probed in a variety of non-related languages. The logically establishable links are the following: Modal verbs are aspect sensitive in the selection of their infinitival complements – embedded infinitival perfectivity implies root modal reading, whereas embedded infinitival imperfectivity triggers epistemic readings. However, in marked contexts such as negated ones, the aspectual affinities of modal verbs are neutralized or even subject to markedness inversion. All of this suggests that languages that do not, or only partially, bestow upon full modal verb paradigms seek to express modal variations in terms of their aspect oppositions. This typological tenet is investigated in a variety of languages from Indo-European (German, Slavic, Armenian), African, Asian, Amerindian, and Creoles. Seeming deviations and idiosyncrasies in the interaction between aspect and modality turn out to be highly rule-based.

Author : Debra Ziegeler
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027230927
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Interfaces with English Aspect written by Debra Ziegeler and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The field of verbal aspect has been a focus for the derivation of a multiplicity of theoretical approaches ranging over decades of linguistic research. From the point of view of recent studies, though, there has been relatively little emphasis on the nature of the interaction of aspect with other categories, and the ways in which our knowledge of aspect acts as a primary semantic contributor to the creation of other basic verbal parameters such as tense and modality. This book aims to cross some of the categorial borders, using a collection of studies on the interfaces of English aspect with other grammatical domains. The studies in the book have been assembled in order to answer two central issues surrounding the nature of English aspect: the possibility of the historical co-existence of a perfective and imperfective grammatical distinction in English, and the derivation of modality as an inference arising out of specific conflicts and combinations of lexical and grammatical aspect. In answering these questions, a data-driven, rather than a theory-driven approach is favoured, and the general principles of Gricean pragmatics and grammaticalisation are applied to a wide range of empirical sources to propose alternative explanations to some long-established problems of English historical linguistics and semantics.

Author : Dalila Ayoun
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027263906
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality written by Dalila Ayoun and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After an introductory chapter that provides an overview to theoretical issues in tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality, this volume presents a variety of original contributions that are firmly empirically-grounded based on elicited or corpus data, while adopting different theoretical frameworks. Thus, some chapters rely on large diachronic corpora and provide new qualitative insight on the evolution of TAM systems through quantitative methods, while others carry out a collostructional analysis of past-tensed verbs using inferential statistics to explore the lexical grammar of verbs. A common goal is to uncover semantic regularities and variation in the TAM systems of the languages under study by taking a close look at context. Such a fine-grained approach contributes to our understanding of the TAM systems from a typological perspective. The focus on well-known Indo-European languages (e.g. French, German, English, Spanish) and also on less commonly studied languages (e.g. Hungarian, Estonian, Avar, Andi, Tagalog) provides a valuable cross-linguistic perspective.

Author : Werner Abraham
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107021227
Total Pages : 455 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modality in Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics written by Werner Abraham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative survey that covers the linguistic questions of modality and mood, offering a new model for the phenomenon.

Author : Werner Abraham
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
ISBN 13 : 3110271079
Total Pages : 470 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modality and Theory of Mind Elements across Languages written by Werner Abraham and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-05-29 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modality is the way a speaker modifies her declaratives and other speech acts to optimally assess the common ground of knowledge and belief of the addressee with the aim to optimally achieve understanding and an assessment of relevant information exchange. In languages such as German (and other Germanic languages outside of English), this may happen in covert terms. Main categories used for this purpose are modal adverbials ("modal particles") and modal verbs. Epistemic uses of modal verbs (like German sollen) cover evidential (reportative) information simultaneously providing the source of the information. Methodologically, description and explanation rest on Karl Bühler's concept of Origo as well as Roman Jakobson's concept of shifter. Typologically, East Asian languages such as Japanese pursue these semasiological fundaments far more closely than the European languages. In particular, Japanese has to mark the source of a statement in the declarative mode such that the reliability may be assessed by the hearer. The contributions in this collection provide insight into these modal techniques.

Author : Werner Abraham
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443842915
Total Pages : 450 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Covert Patterns of Modality written by Werner Abraham and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This typological overview compares the degree to which different languages have means to give expression to modality (possibility, necessity) without lexical and direct inflectional means. The criterial patterns derive from a variety of languages such as German, English, Chinese, French, Scandinavian, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Polish, and Gothic as well as Old High German. They encompass mainly the auxiliaries HAVE and BE, together with either an infinitival embedding of a full verb linked by the infinitival preposition TO, or other aspectual means. It is demonstrated that what appears as typical covert modal expressions in the Germanic languages, and the Indo-European ones in a wider sense, cannot be seen as a recurrent pattern in non-Indo-European languages. Yet, there are recurrent and plausible forms that allow for generalizations.

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 : Jiajuan Xiong
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 9811061874
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Chinese Middle Constructions written by Jiajuan Xiong and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book defines Chinese middle constructions as generic constructions, with their highest syntactically saturated argument always understood as an arbitrary one. This working definition sets “middle construction” apart from “middle voice” in that it can be instantiated by various constructions in Chinese. By scrutinizing these constructions in the framework of Generative Syntax, the book concludes that their formation takes place at the lexical level, without resorting to any syntactic mechanisms and thus that Chinese falls into the category of “lexical middle languages”, which are in contrast to “syntactic middle languages”.

Author : Susann Fischer
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110311860
Total Pages : 702 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Manual of Grammatical Interfaces in Romance written by Susann Fischer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 702 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Different components of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. It has been under debate what the actual range of interaction is and how we can most appropriately represent this in grammatical theory. The volume provides a general overview of various topics in the linguistics of Romance languages by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components and functions as a state-of-the-art report, but at the same time as a manual of Romance languages.

Author : Sibilla Cantarini
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027269149
Total Pages : 377 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Certainty-uncertainty – and the Attitudinal Space in Between written by Sibilla Cantarini and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-11-15 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.