Modality and Diachronic Construction Grammar

Modality and Diachronic Construction Grammar PDF Author: Martin Hilpert
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027259003
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
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.

Modality and Diachronic Construction Grammar

Modality and Diachronic Construction Grammar PDF Author: Martin Hilpert
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027259003
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
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.

Diachronic Construction Grammar

Diachronic Construction Grammar PDF Author: Jóhanna Barðdal
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027268614
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
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.

Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar

Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar PDF Author: Lotte Sommerer
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027261296
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
This volume brings together ten contributions by leading experts who present their current usage-based research in Diachronic Construction Grammar. All papers contribute to the discussion of how to conceptualize constructional networks best and how to model changes in the constructicon, as for example node creation or loss, node-external reconfiguration of the network or in/decrease in productivity and schematicity. The authors discuss the theoretical status of allostructions, homostructions, constructional families and constructional paradigms. The terminological distinction between constructionalization and constructional change is revisited. It is shown how constructional competition but also general cognitive abilities like analogical thinking and schematization relate to the structure and reorganization of the constructional network. Most contributions focus on the nature of vertical and horizontal links. Finally, contributions to the volume also discuss how existing network models should be enriched or reconceptualized in order to integrate theoretical, psychological and neurological aspects missing so far.

Modality in Grammar and Discourse

Modality in Grammar and Discourse PDF Author: Joan L. Bybee
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027229252
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 585

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Book Description
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.

Grammaticalization meets Construction Grammar

Grammaticalization meets Construction Grammar PDF Author: Evie Coussé
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027264163
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Grammaticalization research has increasingly highlighted the notion of constructions in the last decade. In the wake of this heightened interest, efforts have been made in grammaticalization research to more precisely articulate the largely pretheoretical notion of construction in the theoretical framework of construction grammar. As such, grammaticalization research increasingly interacts and converges with the emerging field of diachronic construction grammar. This volume brings together articles that are situated at the intersection of grammaticalization research and diachronic construction grammar. All articles share an interest in integrating insights from grammaticalization research and construction grammar in order to advance our understanding of empirical cases of grammaticalization. Constructions at various levels of abstractness are investigated, both in well-documented languages, such as Ancient Greek, Latin, Spanish, German, Norwegian and English, and in less-described languages, such as Manchu and Mongolian.

Modal Adjectives

Modal Adjectives PDF Author: An Van Linden
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110252945
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The book revisits the notion of deontic modality from the perspective of an understudied category in the modal domain, viz. adjectives. On the basis of synchronic and diachronic corpus studies, it analyses the semantics of English adjectives like essential and appropriate, and uses this to refine traditional definitions of deontic modality, which are mainly based on the study of modal verbs. In a first step, it is shown that the set of meanings expressed by extraposition constructions with deontic adjectives is quite different from the set of meanings identified in the literature on modal verbs. Adjectival complement constructions lack the directive meanings of obligation or permission, which are traditionally regarded as the core deontic categories, and they have semantic extensions towards non-modal meanings in the evaluative domain. In a second step, the analysis of adjectives is used to propose an alternative definition of deontic modality, which covers both the meanings of verbs and adjectives, and which can deal with the different extensions towards modal and non-modal categories. This is integrated into a conceptual map, which works both in diachrony, defining pathways of change from premodal to modal to evaluative meaning, and in synchrony, accommodating refinements within each set of meanings. In the process, this study points to the emergence of partially filled constructions, and it offers additional evidence for well-established changes in the history of English, such as the decline of the subjunctive and the rise of the to-infinitive in complement constructions. The book is of particular interest to researchers and graduate students with a focus on mood and modality, and the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, as well as that between synchrony and diachrony.

Ten Lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar

Ten Lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar PDF Author: Martin Hilpert
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004446796
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
In this book, Martin Hilpert lays out how Construction Grammar can be applied to the study of language change. In a series of ten lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar, the book presents the theoretical foundations, open questions, and methodological approaches that inform the constructional analysis of diachronic processes in language. The lectures address issues such as constructional networks, competition between constructions, shifts in collocational preferences, and differentiation and attraction in constructional change. The book features analyses that utilize modern corpus-linguistic methodologies and that draw on current theoretical discussions in usage-based linguistics. It is relevant for researchers and students in cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and historical linguistics.

Constructional Approaches to English Grammar

Constructional Approaches to English Grammar PDF Author: Graeme Trousdale
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110199173
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This collection of articles brings together new research from both established and emerging international experts in the study of English grammar, all of whom have engaged with the notion of 'construction' in their work. The research here is concerned with both synchrony and diachrony, with the relationship between Construction Grammar and other linguistic theories, and with a number of issues in the study of grammar, such as raising and control phenomena, transitivity, relative clause structure, the syntax of gerunds, attributive and predicative uses of adjectives, modality, and grammaticalization. Some of the articles are written within a constructional framework, while others highlight potential problems with constructional approaches to English grammar; some of the articles are based on data collected from corpora, some on introspection; some of the articles suggest potential developments for diachronic construction grammar, while others seek to compare Construction Grammar with other cognitive linguistic theories, most particularly Word Grammar. The research reported in this volume presents a series of ways of looking at the relationship between constructions and patterns in English grammar, either now or in the past. The book addresses scholars and advanced students who are interested in English grammar, constructional approaches to language, and the relationship between functional and formal issues in linguistic description and theory.

The Oxford Handbook of Modality and Mood

The Oxford Handbook of Modality and Mood PDF Author: Jan Nuyts
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191646342
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
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.

Revisiting Modality

Revisiting Modality PDF Author: Vítor Míguez
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 902724698X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
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.