Modal verb ≈ Modal verb
View article: The Serial Verb Construction: Comparative Concept and Cross-linguistic Generalizations
The Serial Verb Construction: Comparative Concept and Cross-linguistic Generalizations Open
Since the 1970s, serial verb constructions (SVCs) have been discussed widely in African, Oceanic and many other languages throughout the world. This article gives an overview of the most important generalizations about SVCs that have been …
View article
Dialects of English: Studies in Grammatical Variation Open
Sources Maps Acknowledgements 1. English dialect grammar 2. Pronouns and pronominal systems in English dialects 3. The personal dative in Appalachian speech, Donna Christian 4. Demonstrative adjectives and pronouns in a Devonshire dialect,…
View article
Aristotle's de interpretatione. Contradiction and dialectic. Open
Introduction 1. Significant Utterances 2-3 The Name and Verb 4. Phrases and Assertions 5. Simple and Compound Assertions 6. Contradictory Pairs 7. Singular and Universal Assertions 8. Hidden Complex Assertions 9. Future Singular Assertions…
View article
Anankastic conditionals are just conditionals Open
This paper presents a relative theory of tense which accounts for tense behaviors in English in both matrix and embedded contexts. Crucial to this proposal is novel data which shows that the temporal orientation of finite embedded clauses …
View article
Evidential Strategies in Nyamwezi Open
This paper provides an overview of evidential strategies in Nyamwezi. Nyamwezi, like many other African languages, does not have specific grammatical categories which indicate evidentiality, but evidentiality can be expressed (i) through t…
View article
The expression of modality in Logoori Open
This study presents a theoretically informed description of the expression of modality in Logoori (Luyia; Bantu). We document verbal and non-verbal modal expressions in Logoori, and show how these expressions fit into proposed typologies o…
View article
Universals of causative and anticausative verb formation and the spontaneity scale Open
In this paper, I formulate and explain a number of universal generalizations about the formation of causative verbs (overtly marked verbs with causal meaning) and anticausative verbs (overtly marked verbs with noncausal meaning). Given the…
View article
Routine politeness in American and British English requests: use and non-use of please Open
This paper looks at the use and non-use of please in American and British English requests. The analysis is based on request data from two comparable workplace email corpora, which have been pragmatically annotated to enable retrieval of a…
View article
Weak necessity without weak possibility: The composition of modal strength distinctions in Javanese Open
This paper investigates the semantics of the suffix -NE in Javanese (Austronesian; Indonesia), bringing to light new findings to bear on the composition of modal strength distinctions. In a transparent manner, this functional morpheme deri…
View article
Semantic Information and the Syntax of Propositional Attitude Verbs Open
Propositional attitude verbs, such as think and want , have long held interest for both theoretical linguists and language acquisitionists because their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties display complex interactions that have p…
View article
Rethinking Verb Second Open
This volume provides the most exhaustive and comprehensive treatment available of the Verb Second property, which has been a central topic in formal syntax for decades. While Verb Second has traditionally been considered a feature primaril…
View article
A Corpus-based Study of Modal Verbs in Chinese Learners’ Academic Writing Open
While more Chinese students are going abroad to persue their further academic study, how to help them improve academic writing competence has received wide attention. Modality, as one of the complex areas of English grammar, reflects the w…
View article
Modification of indicating verbs in British Sign Language: A corpus-based study Open
Indicating verbs can be directed towards locations in space associated with their arguments. The primary debate about these verbs is whether this directionality is akin to grammatical agreement or whether it represents a fusion of both mor…
View article
A negation-tense interaction in Georgian Sign Language Open
We describe an intriguing interaction of negation and tense in Georgian Sign Language (GESL), a sign language which to date has received close to no attention by linguists. GESL verbs that employ an irregular negation strategy in the prese…
View article
The fundamental left–right asymmetry in the Germanic verb cluster Open
Cinque (Linguist Inq 36(3):315–332, 2005; Universals of language today. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 165–184, 2009; Functional structure from top to toe. Vol. 9 of The cartography of syntactic structures. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 2…
View article
Might do better: Flexible relativism and the QUD Open
The past decade has seen a protracted debate over the semantics of epistemic modals. According to contextualists, epistemic modals quantify over the possibilities compatible with some contextually determined group's information. Relativist…
View article
Reflexive verbs in Hebrew: Deep unaccusativity meets lexical semantics Open
Reflexive verbs in Modern Hebrew show specific morphological marking: only one of the seven verbal templates in the language can be used for reflexives. Yet this morphological marking also appears on anticausative verbs, which have differe…
View article
Dependency Resolution Difficulty Increases with Distance in Persian Separable Complex Predicates: Evidence for Expectation and Memory-Based Accounts Open
Delaying the appearance of a verb in a noun-verb dependency tends to increase processing difficulty at the verb; one explanation for this locality effect is decay and/or interference of the noun in working memory. Surprisal, an expectation…
View article
Alternating constructions with ditransitive<i>geben</i>in present-day German Open
This paper reports on a corpus-based investigation of the verb geben in two alternating ditransitive constructions in present-day German with the Recipient either coded in the dative case (the indirect object construction, abbreviated: IOC…
View article
Cross-modal complementary network with hierarchical fusion for multimodal sentiment classification Open
Multimodal Sentiment Classification (MSC) uses multimodal data, such as images and texts, to identify the users' sentiment polarities from the information posted by users on the Internet. MSC has attracted considerable attention because of…
View article
Free Choice in Modal Contexts Open
This article proposes a new analysis of modal expressions which (i) explains the difference between necessity and possibility modals with respect to the licensing of Free Choice any and (ii) accounts for the related phenomena of Free Choic…
View article
Anticausatives are weak scalar expressions, not reflexive expressions Open
We discuss conceptual and empirical arguments from Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages against an analysis treating anticausative verbs as derived from their lexical causative counterparts under reflexivization. Instead, we defend the s…
View article
Heterogeneity and uniformity in the evidential domain Open
The dissertation is devoted to the formal mechanisms that govern the use of evidentials, expressions of natural language that denote the source of information for the proposition conveyed by a sentence. Specifically, I am concerned with pu…
View article
Stylistic features of case reports as a genre of medical discourse Open
Medical case reports possess a range of unique characteristics which differ from those of research articles and other scientific genres within the framework of written medical discourse. It is to be emphasized that it is highly important f…
View article
Who's afraid of phrasal verbs? The use of phrasal verbs in expert academic writing in the discipline of linguistics Open
This study investigates the hitherto understudied area of the use of phrasal verbs (PVs) in expert academic writing in the discipline of Linguistics. It uses a novel methodology combining the notion of grammatical collocation with the Quir…
View article
Talking about the weather: Two construals of precipitation events in English Open
Weather expressions such as It is raining have proven challenging for linguistic researchers; not only do weather expressions often have special linguistic properties, but languages show considerable variation in the morphosyntactic expres…
View article
Truthmaker semantics for natural language: Attitude verbs, modals, and intensional transitive verbs Open
This paper gives an outline of truthmaker semantics for natural language against the background of standard possible-worlds semantics. It develops a truthmaker semantics for attitude reports and deontic modals based on an ontology of attit…
View article
The road to auxiliariness revisited Open
Auxiliary verbs are known to grammaticalize from lexical verbs, but how do lexical verbs acquire verbal complements to begin with? This article provides an account of the semantic and pragmatic basis of grammaticalization of the Spanish an…
View article
The temporal perspective of epistemics in Dutch Open
A series of experiments is conducted on naïve native speakers of Dutch and English to study the scope relation between tense and epistemic modality. The results are consistent with the claim that epistemics scope over tense (Stowell 2004, …
View article
The landscape of speech reporting Open
Languages offer various ways to report what someone said. There is now a vast but heterogeneous literature on speech report constructions scattered throughout the semantics literature. We offer a bird’s eye view of the entire landscape of …