The Semantic Field Of Modal Certainty

Author : Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
ISBN 13 : 3110198924
Total Pages : 409 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Semantic Field of Modal Certainty written by Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In spite of the vast literature on modality in English, very little research has been done on modal adverbs as a group. While there are studies of individual adverbs, the semantic and pragmatic relations between them have been left largely unexplored. This book takes a close look at the whole field of modal certainty as expressed by adverbs in English. On the basis of corpus data the most frequent adverbs of certainty, including certainly, indeed, and no doubt, are examined from the point of view of their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics. The corpus used is the International Corpus of English - Great Britain, supplemented by data from other present-day English corpora, and questionnaires testing native speakers' intuitions on fine-grained similarities and differences between closely related adverbs. The methodology also includes the study of cross-linguistic equivalents as indicators of semantic-pragmatic relations between adverbs. Translation corpora yield correspondences in Swedish, Dutch, French and German. A detailed study of those correspondences adds useful information for setting up a semantic-pragmatic profile of each adverb, showing where their meanings overlap and where the boundaries are. The concept of semantic maps is relied on for plotting these relations. The book not only provides a thorough empirical study of English adverbs expressing certainty, it also contributes to a better theoretical understanding of the complexity of modal certainty, how it is related to speakers' goals and to other semantic areas. It is the first in-depth study of this kind, combining rich information on English as well as opening up perspectives for further empirical and theoretical research into modality.

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.

Author : Jiun-Shiung Wu
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351660969
Total Pages : 190 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Intensification and Modal Necessity in Mandarin Chinese written by Jiun-Shiung Wu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses intensification and modal necessity in Mandarin Chinese. Intensification is used in this book to describe the speaker’s emphasis on a proposition, because, by emphasizing on a proposition, the speaker intensifies the degree of his/her confidence and affirmativeness toward the truth of a proposition, cf. the distinction between ‘weaker’ and ‘stronger’. Modal necessity discussed in this book refers either to the speaker’s certainty regarding the truth of an inference, judgment or stipulation, that is, epistemic necessity or to the speaker’s certainty concerning the obligatoriness of a proposition, based on rules or regulations, i.e., deontic necessity. This book examines a series of lexical items in Mandarin Chinese that express either intensification or modal necessity, provides a unified semantics and also presents how these lexical items are semantically distinct. Intensification and Modal Necessity in Mandarin Chinese is aimed at instructors, researchers and post-graduate students of Chinese Linguistics.

Author : Vítor Míguez
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 902724698X
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Revisiting Modality written by Vítor Míguez and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2024-04-15 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the first in-depth investigation of modality in Galician linguistics, offering a theoretical discussion of modal categories and a fine-grained description of epistemic adverbs. The first half of the monograph deconstructs the most relevant approaches to modal categories and shows how the traditional concept of modality is a problematic notion, how it relates to other concepts such as evidentiality and mitigation, and how it ought to be conceived of in order to become a more useful instrument for linguistic analysis. A new way of understanding modality is explored and illustrated through Galician examples. The second half of the book zooms in on six epistemic adverbs, which are exhaustively studied from both a formal and a functional perspective. Combining a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, the book shows that adverbs make up a rich semantic scale and establishes several factors that condition their occurrence in discourse, challenging previous conceptions of this grammatical domain.

Author : Nick Riemer
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317412451
Total Pages : 550 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Semantics written by Nick Riemer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Semantics provides a broad and state-of-the-art survey of this field, covering semantic research at both word and sentence level. It presents a synoptic view of the most important areas of semantic investigation, including contemporary methodologies and debates, and indicating possible future directions in the field. Written by experts from around the world, the 29 chapters cover key issues and approaches within the following areas: meaning and conceptualisation; meaning and context; lexical semantics; semantics of specific phenomena; development, change and variation. The Routledge Handbook of Semantics is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in this area.

Author : Isabel Moskowich
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027262012
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Writing History in Late Modern English written by Isabel Moskowich and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2019-10-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focuses on the relationship and interaction of language and science between 1700 and 1900. It pays particular attention to English History writing in late Modern English as compiled in the Corpus of History English Texts (CHET), a newly released sub-corpus of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. The chapters cover methodological issues, the period and the status of the discipline itself, as well as pilot studies for the description of scientific discourse using CHET. They embrace topics in several linguistic fields: discourse analysis, syntax, semantics, morpho-syntax. The studies take into account extralinguistic parameters of texts, such as year of publication, sex of the author, geographical provenance of authors and the communicative formats/genres to which the text sample belongs. In the particular case of CHET, the collected samples can be grouped in eight different categories and such categories, as well as the above-mentioned metadata information, can be used to search the corpus. The book is of interest for scholars specialised in corpus linguistics and historical linguistics, as well as linguists in general. The metadata information used for analysis can also be of interest for historians and historians of science in particular.The Corpus of History English Texts (CHET), accompanied by the Coruña Corpus Tool (CCT), purpose-designed software by IrLab, is accessible online at the Repositorio Universidade Coruña at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21849

Author : Robert Chartrand
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 144388927X
Total Pages : 140 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Extraction and Analysis of Modal Auxiliaries in Consecutive Clauses from a Corpus written by Robert Chartrand and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-22 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although there are a large number of grammar books that explain the form and meaning of the English modal auxiliaries, there are few resources that provide examples as to what modals could be used, and in which cases, when referring to successive clauses. Modal auxiliaries are among the most difficult structures to teach to students of English as a second or foreign language. Some combinations of modals are more commonly used than others, and pairs of modals are used to express a specific meaning. It is not well known, however, exactly which combinations of modals are more popular. Therefore, a method to extract modal auxiliaries in two consecutive clauses from the British National Corpus 2007 XML edition was developed and is discussed in this book. Pair modal frequencies were not well known since simple string match methods could not be used with embedded sentences, complex sentences and compound sentences. This problem was solved by defining rules of sentence structures to identify important clauses carrying the main ideas of sentences, extracting only the important clauses and calculating t-scores. A system was implemented by using computational linguistic techniques for extracting, parsing, and simplifying sentences for learners to study the use of modal auxiliaries. Which collocational expressions are more common? What is the appropriateness of the results? Learners and educators can make use of these results to gain a better understanding of modal auxiliaries, and to facilitate the process of teaching and learning English.

Author : Björn Wiemer
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110726076
Total Pages : 749 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Evidential Marking in European Languages written by Björn Wiemer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-03-07 with total page 749 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Andrea Rocci
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 9402410635
Total Pages : 488 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modality in Argumentation written by Andrea Rocci and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-03-08 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses two related questions that have first arisen in Toulmin’s seminal book on the uses of argument. The first question is the one of the relationship between the semantic analysis of modality and the structure of arguments. The second question is the one of the distinctive place, or role, of modality in the fundamental structure of arguments. These two questions concern how modality, as a semantic category, relates to the fundamental structure of arguments. The book addresses modality and argumentation also according to another perspective by looking at how different linguistic modal expressions may be taken as argumentative indicators. It explores the role of modal expressions as argumentative indicators by using the Italian modal system as a case study. At the same time, it uses predictions/forecasts in the business-financial daily press to investigate the relation between modality and the context of argumentation.

Author : Juana I. Marín-Arrese
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
ISBN 13 : 3110286327
Total Pages : 459 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book English Modality written by Juana I. Marín-Arrese and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book presents new issues and areas of work in modality and evidentiality in English(es), and in relation to other European languages (French, Galician, Lithuanian, Spanish). Given the complexity of the relations among modal and evidential expressions, their constant diachronic evolution, and the variation found in different English-speaking areas, and in different genres and discourse domains, the volume addresses the following issues: the conceptual nature of modality, the relationship between the domains of modality and evidentiality, the evolution and current status of the modal auxiliaries and other modal expressions, the relationship with neighbouring grammatical categories (tense, aspect, mood), and the variation in different discourse domains and genres, in modelling stance and discourse identities.