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Revisiting Sentence Adverbials and Relevance

Author : Irina T. Pandarova

Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company

Page : 266 pages

File Size : 37,79 MB

Release : 2023-06-15

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 9027252831

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Book Description

This book offers a fresh take on several long-standing issues relating to the (non-)truth-conditional interpretation of epistemic, evidential, hearsay and attitudinal sentence adverbials. Drawing on a wealth of data from English and German, it shows for the first time that all four adverbial classes can have both truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional (parenthetical) readings. A novel account is presented according to which (non-)truth-conditional readings may arise at either the syntactic or the pragmatic level. Couched in relevance theory, the book also re-examines the explicature and illocutionary status of the adverbial qualification and the qualified proposition, and refines the notions of pointhood and at-issueness to provide an original information-structural analysis applicable to not just sentence adverbials but a range of other propositional qualifiers. Finally, the investigation identifies five factors affecting (non-)truth-conditional interpretation: linear position, prosody, the semantics of the adverbial, its information-structural properties and the wider context. The book will be of interest to those interested in relevance theory, the semantics/pragmatics interface, the syntax/pragmatics interface and information structure, as well as for syntacticians, semanticists and pragmatists interested in sentence adverbials, other propositional qualifiers and parentheticality, syntactic and interpretational.



Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts

Author : Ewa Jonsson

Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company

Page : 364 pages

File Size : 29,81 MB

Release : 2020-10-15

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 9027260648

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Book Description

This volume provides a diachronic and synchronic overview of linguistic variability and change in involved, speech-related and spoken texts in English. While previous works on the topic have focused on more limited time periods, this book covers data from the 16th century up to the present day. The studies offer new insights into historical and present-day corpus pragmatics by identifying and exploring features of orality in a variety of registers. For readers who are new to the field, the range of approaches will provide a helpful overview; for readers who are already familiar with the field, the volume will shed light on the complexity of factors such as register, sociolinguistic variability and language attitude, thus making it a useful resource and stepping stone for further exploration. The volume celebrates the groundbreaking contributions of Professor Merja Kytö in making accessible speech-related corpus material and leading the way in its exploration.



Revisiting Modality

Author : Vítor Míguez

Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company

Page : 254 pages

File Size : 38,98 MB

Release : 2024-04-15

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 902724698X

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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.



Adverbials in Use

Author : Laure Sarda

Publisher : Presses universitaires de Louvain

Page : 326 pages

File Size : 30,14 MB

Release : 2014-10-14

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 2875583069

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Book Description

Contributions in this volume will lead to a better understanding of the complex interplay of competing motivations affecting the use of adverbials in...



Revisiting Aspect and Aktionsart

Author : Francis G. H. Pang

Publisher : BRILL

Page : 318 pages

File Size : 44,20 MB

Release : 2016-02-02

Category : Religion

ISBN : 9004310886

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Book Description

In Revisiting Aspect and Aktionsart, Francis G.H. Pang employs a corpus approach to analyze the relationship between Greek aspect and Aktionsart. Recent works have tried to predict the meanings that emerge when a certain set of clausal factors and lexical features combine with one of the grammatical aspects. Most of these works rely heavily on Zeno Vendler's telicity distinction. Based on empirical evidence, Pang argues that telicity and perfectivity are not related in a systematic manner in Koine Greek. As a corollary, Aktionsart should be considered an interpretive category, meaning that its different values emerge, not from the interaction of only one or two linguistic parameters, but from the process of interpreting language in context.



Sentence Adverbials in a Functional Description

Author : Eva Koktová

Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing

Page : 106 pages

File Size : 31,24 MB

Release : 1986-01-01

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 9027279322

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Book Description

The author presents empirical arguments in favor of a joint syntactico-semantic treatment, within the framework of a functional generative description, of a range of adverbial expressions which should be viewed as belonging to a single, lexically heterogeneous but functionally homogeneous, class exhibiting scoping properties and functioning as ‘complementation of attitude’ (CA). These CA-expressions do not only share their underlying functional properties but also certain surface-syntax properties.



English Adverbials

Author : Don Lee Fred Nilsen

Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Page : 200 pages

File Size : 48,1 MB

Release : 2017-12-04

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 3110818531

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Book Description



Evidentials and Relevance

Author : Elly Ifantidou

Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing

Page : 252 pages

File Size : 48,26 MB

Release : 2001

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 9781588110329

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Book Description

This book uses Sperber and Wilson s Relevance Theory to show how evidential expressions can be analysed in a unified semantic/pragmatic framework. The first part surveys general linguistic work on evidentials, presents speech-act theory and examines Grice s theory of meaning and communication with emphasis on three main issues: for linguistically encoded evidentials, are they truth-conditional or non-truth-conditional, and do they contribute to explicit or implicit communication? For pragmatically inferred evidentials, is there a pragmatic framework in which they can be adequately accounted for? The second part examines those assumptions of Relevance theory that bear on the study of evidentials, offers an account of pragmatically inferred evidentials and introduces three distinctions relevant to the issues discussed in this book: between explicit and implicit communication, truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning, and conceptual and procedural meaning. These distinctions are applied to a variety of linguistically encoded evidentials, including sentence adverbials, parenthetical constructions and hearsay particles. This book offers convincing evidence that not all evidentials behave similarly with respect to the above distinctions and offers an explanation for why this is so.





Argument and Rhetoric

Author : Ursula Lenker

Publisher : Walter de Gruyter

Page : 310 pages

File Size : 21,21 MB

Release : 2010-02-23

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 311021606X

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Book Description

The book is the first corpus-based study giving a comprehensive overview of English items which have been used as adverbial connectors ('conjuncts', 'linking adverbials'), from Old English to Present-Day English. The author analyses different characteristics of the make-up, functions and use of connectives, and considers morphological and syntactic factors as well as pragmatic, textlinguistic and socio-cultural aspects.