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In this paper, we provide an empirical description and a theoretical analysis of the adverbial use of hǎo ‘(lit.) good’, lǎo ‘(lit.) old’, and guài ‘(lit.) strange’ in Mandarin Chinese. The three adverbs represent a small yet theoretically interesting class of lexical items. Because they manifest certain similarities to canonical degree adverbs such as hěn ‘very’ and fēicháng ‘extremely’, they have been usually treated as pure degree adverbs in the descriptive linguistics literature. Empirical evidence, however, shows that these adverbs actually fuse together both degree intensification and expressive meanings. For instance, they convey strong emotion on the part of the speaker and cannot appear in non-veridical contexts such as negation, modals, information-seeking questions, and antecedents of conditionals. We argue that hǎo, lǎo, and guài are mixed-content lexical items. Based on their empirical behaviors, we follow recent advances in multidimensional semantics to propose a hybrid formal analysis of hǎo, lǎo, and guài by incorporating degree semantics into a multidimensional logic for conventional implicature.

Tariana, a North Arawak language from northwest Amazonia, has a complex system of serial verbs and a certain amount of verb compounding. Serial verbs in Tariana provide important evidence in favour of the existence of cross-linguistically valid defining properties of serial verbs. Verb serialisation and verb compounding are independent grammatical processes, each with a grammaticalisation path of its own, and with distinct functions. Their coexistence in one language is consistent with the principle of iconic motivation: the closer the elements are in surface structure, the more they are grammaticalised or lexicalised.

Te article deals with the sentences that contain pragmatic marker I pray you / thee and its variants as a parenthetical clause. Te linguistic material for synchronic analysis is taken from the texts of the plays written by the English authors during the 16−17th centuries. Te examination of the lexicalgrammatical and stylistic characteristics of the structures under analysis shows that the greatest variety of the marker forms is achieved at the beginning of the period under consideration. Te following processes are seen to be the sources of the diversity: the increase of expression by means of an adverb (now, still, hartyly) or a modal verb, the change of the pronunciation of the constituent words followed by modifcations of their representation in the text (comes into I prythee with variants prithee, pr’ythee), the elimination of subject and / or object (resulting in the forms pray, pray you, I pray). Towards the end of the period under consideration, in the second half of the 17th century, the diversity of the variants of the marker decreases, predominantly the following structures continue to exist: I pray, pray and I prythee. Te parenthetical clause is studied in diachrony as well. Te forms of the marker constituents, the peculiarities of the marker word order, the position of the clause in the sentences, the combination with other pragmatic markers are compared with the sentences from the texts of the 14−15th centuries.

This paper proposes that modal constructions can develop into conditional constructions in Mandarin Chinese and vice versa. Therefore, bidirectionality exists between these kinds of constructions diachronically. While bidirectionality is an apparent violation of unidirectionality, both directions of change are shown to be regular cases of procedural constructionalization, enabled by the fact that modal and conditional constructions can perform identical indirect speech acts (i.e., they are performatively equivalent) and instances of one may be morphosyntactically categorized as the other in Chinese (i.e., they are morphosyntactically vague). A crosslinguistically generalizable prediction is then proposed: bidirectionality is possible if instances of two constructions are performatively equivalent and morphosyntactically vague with respect to each other in certain contexts.

Comparing early and current corpus-based work on ongoing grammatical change in English, the present study argues that progress tends to manifest itself in the more comprehensive and systematic coverage of changes known to be under way rather than in the discovery of genuinely new diachronic processes. As will be shown in two case studies on modal/semi-modal verbs and the progressive, there are three reasons for this. First, corpus research on ongoing change has been helped by increases in the size of available corpora and even more so by better coverage of spoken English. Secondly, researchers have a much wider range of statistical methods to choose from. Thirdly, conceptual advances have been made in theoretical models of change, particularly with regard to the impact of language ideologies and prescriptivism. In the study of ongoing changes, the corpus-based approach remains indispensable because it remedies the errors of impressionistic observation and helps shift attention from a small number of shibboleths important to prescriptivists to the groundswell of grammatical change that generally proceeds below the level of speakers’ conscious awareness.

Concebemos a Fraseologia como interdisciplinar e estabelecemos diálogo com a Linguística Cognitiva (GURILLO, 1997; 2001; OLZA MORENO, 2011; MERINO GONZÁLEZ, 2015) a fim de descrever, sincronicamente, a unidade fraseológica “deixar a poeira baixar” no português, que denota uma ordem ou um conselho do locutor ao interlocutor, para que este aguarde o fim das situações conflitantes. Utilizamos o Corpus do Português (DAVIS; FERREIRA, 2016) para análise e defendemos a hipótese de que esse fraseologismo surge da metáfora conceitual: ADVERSIDADE É DEVIDO AO TEMPO RUIM, relacionada às condições climáticas. Ademais, ratificamos a fixação e a idiomaticidade dessa unidade, por seguir a ordenação formal dos verbos modais do português e ser dotada de composicionalidade motivada, uma vez que recuperamos pistas da contribuição de seus componentes para o significado total.

Situated within the field of developmental interlanguage pragmatics, this cross-sectional study examines pragmalinguistic development in the request production of two groups of young English learners: Greek Cypriot and Norwegian, aged roughly 9, 11 and 13. Specifically, it focuses on learners' request head acts and modification across the three proficiency levels within the Greek and Norwegian groups, and across the two L1 contexts. Eighty-eight Greek and 79 Norwegian learners participated in the study. The data was elicited through a video-based oral discourse completion task, performed in groups of 3–5. Overall, a clearer developmental path was observed in the Norwegian learners' pragmatic performance, whose requests displayed significant differences between the age groups regarding head act sub-strategies, use of modal verbs, lexical downgrading and supportive moves. While also showing a clear linear development in head act sub-strategies, Greek Cypriot learners' only other area of development was the head act directness. A comparison of corresponding age groups from the two contexts revealed both areas of convergence (head act strategies and modal verbs) and divergence (lexical downgraders and supportive moves) with increasing age and proficiency, as well as areas that remained similar throughout (syntactic downgraders), suggesting different underlying influences on young learners’ request development.

Este artigo discute problemas e comportamentos morfológicos dos verbos modais do português brasileiro dever, poder e ter que/de. Visando a contribuir com os estudos sobre modalidade no português, que abordam questões semânticas e sintáticas, este artigo discute propriedades especificamente morfológicas dos verbos modais, como a ausência de certas formas flexionais, a não composicionalidade semântica no pretérito imperfeito, categoria verbal modal versus lexical e a constituência e identidade estrutural de ter que e ter de. Embora algumas questões sejam especulativas e/ou permaneceram embrionárias, o presente artigo propõe uma nova maneira de formular certas questões morfossintáticas e morfossemânticas para o estudo dos modais.

This paper revisits the longstanding observation that children produce modal verbs (e.g., must, could) with their root meanings (e.g., abilities, obligations) by age 2, typically a year or more ear...

This article is devoted to the pragmatic features of word-sentences, separated as special parts of speech in Uzbek language. The pragmatic feature of word-sentences is higher than other units of language in speech statement. Though word-sentences don’t have a content of proposition, they completely express communicative intention and content from illocutionary aspect. Studying the word-sentences in Uzbek language from pragmatic aspect discovers peculiarities of usage in speech system units. In Uzbek linguistics word-sentences were studied as interjections, descriptives, and vocative sentences by E.Shodmonov, S.Usmonov, R.Kongurov, S.Saidov, B.Orinboyev, O.Lafasov; R.Bobokalonov studied them under the concept of semantic-functional formed word-sentences. This system is divided into 4 groups: 1) modal verbs; 2) interjections; 3) positive/negative words; 4) offer-indicational words. In this article several methods such as descriptional, differential-semantic, discursive and component analysesare used.

This paper explores the learnability of English indefinite any, Dutch modal verb hoeven, and Mandarin Chinese (WH-)indefinite/pronoun shenme. These three expressions, belonging to different syntactic categories in different languages, have been referred to as Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) in the literature, as they are all restricted to contexts that in some sense count as negative although there are differences in the types of semantic environment that may license them. By investigating the distribution of these three expressions in both child and child-directed speech recorded in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2009), this paper argues that children in their acquisition of these NPIs employ the same conservative widening learning strategy (Berwick and Weinberg 1986; Manzini and Wexler 1987), which prevents them from overgeneration. A two-stage acquisition process is detected for each of the three NPIs. However, distinct learning pathways are found, which we take as evidence indicating different underlying analyses of these expressions at different stages in child language. Taking into consideration the input characteristics, the distributional patterns of the three expressions in adult grammar, and the children’s lexical development, we hypothesize what the analyses of any, hoeven, and shenme at different acquisition stages look like. This provides us with a different view of the nature, or the reason underlying the restricted distribution of these expressions in adult language.

It is argued that legal language should be formal, precise and clear to avoid ambiguity and/or misunderstanding. As rights and duties are communicated through modals, clarity and precision in drafting and translating them is crucial. Otherwise, there is a possibility of conveying loose messages in the source text or different and/or inconsistent messages in the target text. However, the drafting of Arabic modal expressions does not follow clear guidelines, and their translation differs from one translator to another. This paper investigates how deontic modality of obligation and prohibition is used in The Leeds Annotated Parallel Corpus of Arabic-English Constitutions in comparison to The Leeds Monolingual Corpus of English Constitutions. More specifically, the paper presents a classification of these modal expressions and investigates the different lexical variants expressed in a Corpus of Arabic Constitutions. The paper uses corpus-based tools to analyse the different lexical forms used for deontic modality of obligation and prohibition in Arabic and how they are rendered into English.Results of such analysis are compared to a non-translated Corpus of English Constitutions to find out whether the deontic meaning of the modals is comparable to the set of deontic modals used in the constitutions originally drafted in English. The corpus-based analysis gave a detailed classification of a variety of modal expressions used in the Arabic Corpus. It also showed that the translation of deontic modals of obligation and prohibition from Arabic into English is influenced by the source text lexical variations; however, the corpus techniques employed in the study managed to capture some comparable modals in both corpora. Es comúnmente aceptado que el lenguaje legal debe ser formal, preciso y claro para evitar ambigüedad y malentendidos. Dado que los derechos y deberes se comunican a través de verbos modales, la claridad y precisión al traducirlas son cruciales. De no ser así, existe la posibilidad de comunicar los mensajes del texto original de forma imprecisa o que los mensajes del texto meta sean diferentes o incoherentes a los del original. Sin embargo, el uso de las expresiones modales en árabe no se atiene a normas claras y su traducción puede variar de un traductor a otro. Este artículo investiga cómo se usa la modalidad deóntica de obligación y prohibición en The Leeds Annotated Parallel Corpus of Arabic-English en comparación con The Leeds Monolingual Corpus of English Constitutions. En concreto, el artículo presenta una clasificación de estas expresiones modales e investiga las diferentes variantes léxicas que aparecen en un corpus de constituciones en árabe. El estudio utiliza herramientas de corpus para analizar las diferentes formas léxicas que se usan para la modalidad deóntica de obligación y prohibición en árabe, así como su traducción al inglés. Los resultados de este análisis se contrastan con un corpus de constituciones en inglés para dilucidar si el significado deóntico de los modales es comparable al conjunto de modales deónticos usados en constituciones en inglés. El análisis de corpus arroja una clasificación detallada de expresiones modales usadas en el corpus árabe. Asimismo, muestra que las traducciones de los modales deónticos de obligación y prohibición del árabe al inglés están influidos por las variaciones léxicas del texto original; a pesar de que las técnicas de análisis de corpus empleadas en el estudio consiguen capturar modales comparables en ambos corpus.

This article examines the distribution and socio­linguistic patterning of (quasi-)modals which express strong obligation/necessity, namely must, have to, have got to, got to and need to, in Australian English. Variationist studies in other varieties of English have had contrasting findings in terms of distributions of root forms, as well as their conditioning by social and linguistic factors. The corpus analysis suggests real-time increased use of need to and decrease in have got to through comparison to earlier findings. The variationist analysis shows quasi-modals have to, have got to and got to as sensitive to speaker age and sex, and a recent increase of have to via apparent time modelling. Linguistic conditioning relating to the type of obligation and subject form is also found. The study contributes to socio­linguistic understanding of this large-scale change in English and the place of Australian English amongst other varieties.

The article is an overview and a summary of the study of modal verbs in the German language in Russian and foreign linguistics, from Antiquity to the present day, in line with the holistic study of modality in world linguistics. Using the methods of generalization and systematization, the author analyzes monographs and articles by Russian and foreign experts in the field of the history of the German language, functional grammar, and morphology. While a considerable number of works by foreign and Russian linguists in the 20th century are devoted to the issues of semantics of preterite-present and modal verbs in specific historical periods of the development of the German language, there are still many open questions in this area. Throughout almost the entire 20th century, Germanists viewed modal verbs mainly as a means of expressing internal modality, i.e., the attitude of the speaker to the action being performed. However, in the late 20th and early 21st century, they began to actively study the subjective use of modal verbs. Much modern literature on the subject is devoted to the study of German modal verbs in the function of subjective (epistemic) modality. This article focuses on etymological, semantic, grammatical, and functional features of modal verbs in modern German and discusses a number of controversial issues, such as the question of whether modal verbs are a closed or open cluster of vocabulary, that is, whether it is possible, at the present stage of language history, to include other linguistic units into the category of modal units, it these other units answer certain semantic or grammatical criteria. It is also open to discussion whether there is a one-to-one corre-spondence between a modal verb and the type of modal relations that is expressed with the help of this verb in speech, and vice versa. The author highlights such significant aspects as grammaticalization of modal verbs, correlation of modal verbs with various types of modal relations, primary and secondary meanings of modal verbs, characteristics of the preterito-presentia, compatibility of modal verbs, and syntactic features of their usage. The relevance of this study lies in the fact that it gives a more comprehensive understanding of functions and pragmatics of modal verbs as a special lexical cluster in speech.

To inculcate our native language in the minds of the younger generation, self-awareness, to increase their interest in language learning, and in what form teaching is taught

This paper provides a classification of modal verbs of possibility and necessity in Late Archaic and Early Middle Chinese based on an analysis of their scopal features with respect to negation. It shows that circumstantial readings and deontic readings are interpreted in two different syntactic positions which can be determined by the scope of negation following the cartographic approach proposed in Tsai (2008, 2015) and the proposal of Cormack and Smith (2002) of a Polarity Head, which constitutes a syntactic divide of the domain of necessity modals from the domain of circumstantial modals. Our analysis of the scope of negation demonstrates that the deontic interpretation of possibility modals requires their upward movement from the lexical to the functional domain as part of the grammaticalization process from pre-modal lexical verbs to modal auxiliaries of different functions in Modern Mandarin. In Early Middle Chinese, negated modal verbs of possibility start to replace the synthetic modal negators of Archaic Chinese as part of the general process of analyticization of Chinese. We also show that the only true necessity modals in Late Archaic Chinese belong to the category of circumstantial modals due to their scopal features when they are negated.

Motivated by an increasing use of social media for the expression of personal stance towards a certain target, we analyse the language used to produce such opinionated content with expressions of sentiment, which represents the main data source for sentiment analysis. We use the first manually annotated corpus for sentiment analysis of the Serbian language developed for the service sector of higher education. Our study focuses on how various linguistic constructions, used in different context, influence the sentiment polarity of a text. Our findings indicate that sentiment expressions and negation have a most significant role in determining whether the text conveys positive, neutral, or negative sentiment, while intensifiers (words which either increase or decrease sentiment) have a considerable influence on sentiment intensity. We also present an analysis of the impact of conjunctions, conditional sentences, comparative and modal verbs, and pronouns on sentiment polarity and intensity. Based on the derived observations, we propose a set of rules that could be integrated with machine learning algorithms into an automated sentiment analysis system for the Serbian language. Our findings also make a much-needed contribution to the few currently available resources for natural language processing of Serbian.

This paper presents Chierchia (2013)’s conjecture, according to which the distribution and interpretation of scalar items, free choice, polarity item and implicatures are conditioned by the logical context in which they occur. In downward entailment contexts, the exaustification of the alternatives does not generate a grammatical contradiction, whereas in upwards contexts, exaustifying the alternatives leads to a grammatical contradiction. We show that the conjecture rightly predicts intuitive judgments of those items in Brazilian Portuguese and explains the experimental results found by Pires (2018) on the behavior of modals in Brazilian Portuguese.

The aim of this paper is to examine and describe similarities and differences in the use and distribution of modal verbs by contrasting English and Serbian legal texts. The corpus consists of an English version of The Convention on the Rights of the Child and its official Serbian translation. We started from an assumption that modal verbs are more frequent in legal texts in English than in Serbian, where we expected to find examples of lexical items with modal meanings instead. In addition, we assumed that due to its specific use in legal texts of this kind, the English modal ‘shall’ will show the highest frequency of occurrence. A total of one hundred and twenty six (126) modal verbs and a semi-modal ‘need not’ were found in the source text. The results of the analysis support the initial presumption that ‘shall’ will stand out as the most frequent of all modal verbs (60% of all occurrences). Despite the high occurrence rate of the legalistic ‘shall’ in the source text, translation solutions in the target language only rarely take the form of the modal verb. Most often deontic notions of imperative directness and necessity in Serbian legislative writings are expressed by means of the present indicative. The analysis also indicates that translation solutions for the remaining English modal verbs most often take the form of a modal verb or a modal lexeme with a corresponding meaning in Serbian.

The main aim of the present paper is to compare the realization patterns of directive speech acts produced by the Speaker of the House of Representatives of New Zealand and the Speaker of the House of Representatives of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The paper focuses on head acts only, disregarding modification. Head acts are analyzed and compared in terms of their explicitness and implicitness, as defined in the framework proposed by Vine (2004a, 2004b). Overall results show that explicit head acts were dominant in both data sets. Furthermore, significant differences were noticed in terms of the findings for certain sub-forms of the explicit head acts, such as the imperative form, which is more frequent in parliamentary directives in Serbian, as are performative verbs. Modal verbs were typical of the parliamentary directives in English. The results are discussed in the context of the findings of previous relevant studies.

The Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a process to automate the text or speech of Natural Languages. This automation is mainly conducted for Western languages. The Arabic Language got less focus in this area. This paper presents a Model to recognize an Arabic sentence. A new morphological model based on regular expressions is developed to recognize the Arabic verbs. A hash table containing all Arabic three-letters' root of verbs is implemented. The total number of Arabic verbs that are derived from three-letters' root size is 23090. The number of roots is 6104. A set of rules forming the Arabic grammar is used to derive and analyze the syntax of Arabic sentences. About 87% of the verbs represented in our regular expressions' engine are detected. Moreover, the sentences are also recognized. In several Surat of the Quran, only 9% of the detected verbs are false-positive (a non-verb declared as a verb), and 4% are considered false-negative (a verb is considered as a noun). This rate is mainly because we are not using vowels even that the Quran (our case study) is using them. The reason behind our decision is to be able to handle all Arabic texts, which mostly are not using vowels.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/APULTP.2020.40.140-155 This article contains systematic and detailed analysis of morphological and semantic parameters of Germanic preterite-present verbs, dividing them into major and minor subgroups. The development of both preterite-present subgroups and their steady transformation into the modal verbs is a specific feature of all Germanic languages. Since the modal verbs of the Modern Germanic languages are morphologically defective, it is commonly assumed that preterite-present verbs of the old Germanic languages lost some of their morphological features in the process of turning into modal verbs. The semantic aspects of this process are rather obscure. All Germanic languages were losing some preterite-present verbs in the process of transformation from the Gothic language, which had fourteen preterite-present verbs. In OE there were twelve preterite-present verbs. Six of them survived in NE. The morphological description focuses on the finite and non-finite forms of the preterite-present verbs, which belong to the minor subgroup. The detailed description helps to see the origin and development of the minor subgroup in the new light. The description encompasses the data of classical Indo-European languages and Old Germanic languages. The authors emphasize the expediency of turning to the theory of preterite/strong verb origin, the verbs in question may be regarded as inter-group, hybrid units. In order to gain insight into the origin of the Germanic languages it is necessary to look into the history of the Gothic and West Germanic and North Germanic languages. The authors find it useful to compare common and different phenomena, highlighting individual specific processes taking place in the process of development of the Germanic languages. These languages are analyzed on different stages of their development, but inline with the view that the languages co-operated and coexisted in the same area. The data given in the article are used to analyze the problem implementing comparative grammar tools. The authors were particularly careful to take all grammatical forms into consideration while working with the lexical units from the ancient sources. Some additional information was taken from Greek, Latin and Sanskrit to produce reliable and consistent comparison of the German language with the rest of Indo-European languages. Key words: preterite-present verbs, Germanic languages, Common Germanic roots, semantic derivation, grammatical cooperation. Information about the authors: Botsman Andriy Vasylovych – Ph.D. in Chemistry, Ph.D. in English Philology, Associate Professor; Associate Professor of the Department of English Philology and Intercultural Communication; Institute of Philology; Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Dmytruk Olga Viktorivna – Ph.D. in English Philology, Associate Professor; Associate Professor of the Department of English Philology and Intercultural Communication; Institute of Philology; Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. E-mail: a.botsman@knu.ua; o.dmytruk@knu.ua REFERENCES Bennet, W. H. (1980). An Introduction to the Gothic Language. New York: Modern Language Association, 190 p. [in English]. Braun, F. (1922). Die Urbevölkerung Europas und die Herkunft der Germanen. Berlin: Halle a.d. Saale. 278 s. [in German]. Braune, W. (1981). Gotische Grammatik. Auflage. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. 205 s. [in German]. Feist, S. (1924). Indogermanen und Germanen. Berlin: Halle a.d. Saale. 348 S. [in German]. Gamkrelidze, T. V. & Ivanov, Vjaceslav V., Jakobson, R. et al. (2010). Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans. A Reconstruction and Historical Analysis of a Proto-Language and Proto-Culture. Part I: The Text. Part II: Bibliography, Indexes. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. 864 p. [in English]. Gregersen, S. (2019). Anna Wojtyś. 2017. The Non-Surviving Preterite-Present Verbs in English: The Demise of* dugan, munan,*-nugan,*þurfan, and unnan. Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 51. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 258 pp., 12 tables. Anglia, 137(1), 163-167. https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2019-0012 [in English]. Heyne, M. (1906). Deutsches Wörterbuch. Berlin: Halle. 1298 s. [in German]. Holthausen, F. (1934). Gotisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Berlin: Halle a.d. Saale. 1376 S. [in German]. Jellinek, M. H. & Hermann, P. (Ed.). (2017). Geschichte der gotischen Sprache. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. 209 S. [in German]. Kluge, F. (1913). Ungermanisch. Strassburg: Halle. 348 S. [in German]. Lehmann, W. (1986). A Gothic Etymological Dictionary. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. 712 p. [in English]. Menge, H. & Güthling, O. (1910). Menge-Güthling griechisch-deutsches und deutschgriechisches Wörterbuch, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Etymologie. Berlin: Halle a.d. Saale. 989 s. [in German]. Mossé, F. (1949). Manuel de la langue gotique. Textes. Glossaire. Paris: Aubier. 272 p. [in English]. Plotkin, V. (2008). The Evolution of Germanic Phonological Systems: Proto-German, Gothic, West Germanic, and Scandinavian. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press. 230 p. [in English]. Randall, W. & Jones, H. (2015). On the early origins of the Germanic preterite presents. Trans Philologic Soc, 113: 137-176. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-968X.12045 [in English]. Rauch, I. (2003). The Gothic language: grammar, genetic provenance and typology, readings. New York: P. Lang. 192 p. [in English]. Snædal, M. A Concordance to Biblical Gothic. (1998). Reykjavík: Institute of Linguistics, University of Iceland; University of Iceland Press. Vol. 1 = Introduction. Texts; pp. xxxiv, 70. Vol. 2 = Concordance. 1257 p. [in English]. Stig, K. J. George. (2018). The preterite-present: an investigation into the underlying origin process. (PhD diss., University of Aberdeen), 483 p. [in English]. Tomaszewska, M. (2019). The evolution of surviving English preterite-present verbs (āgan, cunnan, *durran, *magan, *mōtan, *sculan): a corpus-based study. (PhD diss., UniwersyteWarszawski), 256 p. [in English]. Voyles, J. B. (1992). Early Germanic Grammar: Pre-, Proto-, and Post-Germanic Languages. San Diego, California: Academic Press. 302 p. [in English]. Wright, J. (1997). Grammar of the Gothic Language. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 366 p. [in English]. Wright, J. & Wright, E. M. (1925). Old English Grammar (3rd edition). London: Oxford University Press, 870 p. [in English].

Understanding leadership as a discursive performance, this study explores televised speeches and press briefings given by the German chancellor Angela Merkel in March and April 2020 during the first wave of the Covod-19 pandemic. Merkel’s televised communications deserve special attention for at least two reasons; first, Merkel was hailed as one of the few national leaders who successfully led through the first wave of the pandemic. Secondly, her communications were praised as examples of successful persuasive efforts. Using a corpus-assisted approach, this study identifies the frequent lexico-grammatical devices that she employed to do her ‘convincing’ work. The study then compares the identified features against her communicative style in speeches delivered in pre-pandemic times. The comparative insights show that in the limited mediatised time, Merkel chose a specific set of lexico-grammatical devices including certain pronouns, modal verbs, time deictics and logical connectors that highlighted the interpersonal dimension of her communications, urgency of the situation and logical cause-effect argumentation. While these devices were not entirely new in Merkel’s public statements, they were used with much higher frequency in her Covid-19 speeches signalling a discursive change in her communicative style during the evolving health crisis. The study provides support for the notion of (effective) leadership as a discursive and situated activity; an effective leader will select certain language devices from the available pool of resources that are appropriate to the context of the situation (here a pandemic) and its aims (persuading citizens to adhere to preventative measures). The paper finishes with an assessment of Merkel’s mediatised discourse during the first two months of the pandemic against her overall communicative style. It argues that the successfulness of her Covid-19 televised performances depended not just on the use of specific discursive devices but also on the contrast that they created with her usual impersonal approach.

This article reports on the analysis of three major markers of necessity in Luganda, i.e. the modal auxiliaries -téekw- and -lina and the verbal prefix -andi-. On the basis a 4-million-word corpus it is argued that, overall, the auxiliary -téekw- is more established as a necessity marker, as it is involved in the expression of all necessity subcategories except participant-inherent dynamic necessity. The auxiliary -lina is less semantically diversified, expressing only participant-imposed, situational and deontic necessity, while the verbal prefix -andi- expresses only deontic necessity. A comparison of corpus data with data from older literature on Luganda further shows that the objective category of participant-inherent dynamic necessity, which is not associated with any of the three markers described, is perhaps expressed by less-grammaticalised forms. These forms are also, together with other grammaticalised forms that have increasingly become rare, assumed to be part of the devices that could have been responsible for expressing necessity in earlier stages of the language, given that the three markers described in this research have only begun to meaningfully express necessity since the second half of the 20th century.

This paper examines a type of existential there sentence found in Middle English that has been argued to have a structure similar to transitive expletive constructions (TECs) in other Germanic languages, or to follow from the presence of NegP below T during the relevant period. Based on an exhaustive analysis of the 74 examples of this construction found in the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English (out of a total of over six thousand sentences from 1125 to 1913 containing there coded as expletive), we observe that 67 contain both a modal verb and clausal negation licensing a negative associate, unlike TECs found in other Germanic languages, and that the construction is found only between 1390 and 1600. We argue that the availability of this construction was due to a transitory alignment of three syntactic properties in this stage of the language: (i) modals were still main verbs merged within vP, but took a reduced complement consisting of only an inner clausal phase, and did not take a thematic external argument; (ii) English still had negative concord; (iii) Voice and viewpoint Aspect shared a single syntactic projection. The confluence of these three factors provided a non-thematic specifier position, [Spec,vP], into which there could merge. Before the late 14th century, modals were full verbs taking a thematic external argument and full clausal complements, and after about 1600, they were merged directly in T, occurring in a monoclausal rather than a (reduced) biclausal structure. At no point did the English monoclausal spine have the structural room to accommodate a true Germanic TEC.

The path opened by themodern language understanding that started with Saussure in 19thcentury gave rise to new approaches in language studies, and new methodsemerged as a result of these new approaches. While this new perspective createdcertain new concepts regarding the language, certain terms in the traditionalgrammar were started to be reinvestigated and examined. The recent developmentsin the field of linguistics have led to the development of new theories thatfeature functionality rather than formalism, and this drew attention to thenecessity of function-oriented studies. In traditional grammar approaches thatwere based on formalism, the concepts modal and modality were examinedunidimensionally both in terms of their designation and the functions theymarked. Nevertheless, as meaning in the language is too large to fit any form,it is impossible to solely depend on the modals in expressing emotions, whichare exclusively grammatical groups. Each emoting of an individual is namedmodalities, and it is expressed in the process of communication sometimes usingmodal affixes, sometimes modality markers, and sometimes suprasegmental soundunits. In the present study, utterances expressing request modality inHistorical Kipchak Turkish texts were addressed, and the sub-modal values andthe structural elements used to express them were investigated. That therequest modal -e/a in modernTurkish spoken in Turkey has not yet been formed in Kipchak Turkish era alsomade it obligatory to use different modal morphemes and structures inexpressing the request modality. Especially the affix –ġay/-gey from which certain researchers propounds that the request modal -e/-a originates, imperative modal affixesfor their dominant meaning of request in first person conjugation among theever-controversial subjects in the imperative modal paradigm, the desiderative affix -sa/ -se used aspredicates in sentences, and modality verbs such as “tile-, kirek” in utterances are some of the structures seen inreporting the request mode in Kipchak Turkish era., 19.yy.da Saussure ilebaşlayan çağdaş dil anlayışının açtığı yol, dil çalışmalarında yeniyaklaşımların doğmasını sağlamış ve bu yaklaşımlar sonucu yeni yöntemler ortayaçıkmıştır. Bu yeni bakış açısı, dille ilgili birtakım yeni kavramlar üretirkengeleneksel dil bilgisinde yer alan birtakım terimler de yeniden ele alınıp irdelenmeye başlanmıştır. Sonyıllarda dilbilim alanındaki gelişmeler biçimsellikten ziyade işlevselliği önplana çıkaran yeni kuramların gelişmesini sağlamış, bu durum da işlev odaklıçalışmaların gerekliliğine dikkat çekmiştir. Biçimselliğeağırlık veren geleneksel dil bilgisi yaklaşımlarında kip ve kiplikkavramları gerek adlandırılmaları gerekse işaretledikleri işlevler bakımındantek boyutlu olarak değerlendirilmekteydi. Oysa dilde anlam, biçimesığdırılamayacak kadar geniş olduğundan duygu durumlarını ifade etmede yalnızcagramatikal bir ulam olan kiplere bağlıkalmak mümkün değildir. Bireylerin duygu durumlarının her biri kiplik olarakadlandırılır ve iletişim sürecinde kimi zaman kip ekleri, kimi zaman kiplikişaretleyicileri, kimi zaman ise parçalarüstü ses birimleri kullanılarak ifadeedilir. Dilde sayısız kiplik alan vardır. Bu çalışmada Tarihî Kıpçak Türkçesimetinlerinde isteme kipliği bildiren sözceler ele alınarak alt kiplik değerlerive bunları ifade etmede yararlanılan yapı unsurları ele alınmıştır. GünümüzTürkiye Türkçesinde istek kipi eki –e/-a’nın, Kıpçak Türkçesi döneminde henüzoluşmamış olması da isteme kipliği ifade etmede farklı yapılardan ve kipbiçimbirimlerinden faydalanılmasını zorunlu kılmıştır. Özellikle istek kipi eki–e/-a’nın kökeninin dayandığı ileri sürülen –ġay/-geyeki, emir kipi paradigmasında halen tartışmalı konulardan biri olan 1.şahıs çekimlerinde ağır basan istek anlamından dolayı emir kipi ekleri, cümlelerde yüklem görevinde kullanılan dilek-şart –sa/-se eki, sözcelerde geçen“tile-, kirek” gibi kiplik fiillerTarihî Kıpçak Türkçesi döneminde isteme kipliği bildirmede görülen yapılardanbazılarıdır.

This paper examines the usage frequency of phonetically reduced modals (i.e. gonna, wanna, gotta) in Present-day English. It is assumed that in distinct sociolinguistic and discourse contexts, the use of reduced modals is dynamic. To collect the data, there are two corpora used in this study, Corpus of Contemporary American English and Global Web-Based English as the representatives of Present-day English. The analysis focuses on usage frequency of phonetically reduced modals over period of time, in different regions, different medium of language use, and different text types. The frequencies were further interpreted based on sociolinguistics and text genre perspective to reveal the factors triggering the dynamic of use. The results of this study show the use of reduced modals is dramatically escalating in the last decades. According to regional observation, the use of reduced modals is more frequent in the United States than in other English-speaking countries. In relation to medium of language use, reduced modals are more commonly used in spoken language than in written language. As for text type, the usage frequency of reduced modal in fiction texts is the highest compared to academic texts and news texts. Academic texts seem to avoid these linguistic units since this sort of text must obey the use of standard language in which reduced forms are less standard and more colloquial. This phonetic reduction is plausible to occur since language system and language use apply economy principle. The use of phonetically reduced modals, however, varies in different context, varies in different context, influenced by colloquialization: the more colloquial the context is, the more frequent they are. In general, language use is phonetically simplified and sociolinguistically colloquialized.

This paper discusses the importance of modal adverbs and its implications for researching modality in general on examples from the English and Serbian languages and points to some theoretical lackings in Serbian literature on modality. The analysis of the corpus examples is based on the theory of modality as epistemic deixis with the aim of showing that epistemic modal adverbs express the notion of degree on an epistemic scale in a way that traditionally discussed modal verbs are unable to do. The semantic gradability of modal adverbs is discussed in epistemic contexts where they can occur on their own, or collocate with modal verbs. The paper also focuses on combinations of epistemic adverbs with other adverbs that have an effect on the degree of modality expressed, either a heightening or lowering effect.

Neste trabalho, procuraremos sugerir uma interpretação semântico-pragmática para as Sentenças Imperativas (Imp) no Português Brasileiro (PB) que se utilizam do verbo modal/operador modal “pode/poder”, ao contrário de outras interpretações que se constatam na literatura especializada, as quais sejam: interpretações sintáticas das Imp ou de uma semântica de base funcionalista. Aqui, ao contrário, procuraremos sugerir interpretações das Imp, tendo como fundamentação teórica as teorias Pragmáticas de Atos de Fala e um modelo bastante simplificado de Semântica Formal. A razão e o estímulo para tal trabalho surgem da leitura de Jary e Kissine (2014), obra que justamente procura interpretações semânticas e pragmáticas para as Imp. Assim, das diversas propostas teóricas apresentadas por aqueles autores, tomamos como pressuposto justamente a Semântica denotacional verifuncional e a Pragmática de Atos de Fala para procurar mostrar uma possibilidade de interpretação das Imp em PB.

Following the interpretation of a modality as a complex functional and semantic category, which covers various private meaning (except for evidence ones), the author touches upon the question of consistency in the language. The systemically conditioned means of expression of modality in speech and texts is the problem of general and Finno-Ugric linguistics. The field records of the author (made in 1985–2001) and the works of Khanty literature served as actual material. In this article, the relationship between speech and text (written) is considered dialectically: they are not contrasted, as they are recognized as different, independent forms of language. However, it is emphasized that speech is by definition has richer intonation, while a written text does not have signs for an adequate and complete reflection of all nuances of pronunciation. It is thought that the basis for the exact expression of any of the modal meanings is the intonation of the phrase, which is different when expressing statements, wishes, consent, prohibition, possibility, necessity, and other attitudes emanating from the speaker. It recognizes a variety of means to express modality – intonation, lexical, grammatical, and mixed. Particles and modal names are defined as lexical (in the examples, it notes their combination with grammatical elements). Using the example of modal particles and names that function in the the Kazymsky dialect of the Khanty language, it defines the main features of consistency in the language.

This article investigates whether grammatical change in South African English (SAfE) leads to convergence or divergence in the different varieties within SAfE. Contact between speakers of English and other languages potentially leads to divergence from varieties beyond SAfE, and to convergence within SAfE. Modal auxiliaries show convergence between White SAfE (WSAfE) and Afrikaans, but not between WSAfE and Black SAfE (BSAfE). No convergence is observed between the innovative use of the progressive in BSAfE and WSAfE, except for similar long-term frequency increases. The omission of the complementiser that shows similar long-term frequency changes between WSAfE, Afrikaans and BSAfE. The findings indicate that higher degrees of contact between speakers result in closer convergence, especially as far as constructional semantics are concerned, but convergent frequency changes seem to be possible without the same closeness of contact.

This chapter aims to investigate the features of abusive and hateful comments in Lithuanian news portals and to outline potential classifiers of hate speech (HS). Building on previous work [Ruzaitė. In Search of Hate Speech. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 14(1): 93–116 (2018). 10.1515/lpp-2018-0005], this study applies the framework of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis to investigate a database of over 10,000 comments written on controversial issues. The results reveal some features of verbal aggression typical of both abusive and HS comments (e.g., racial slurs and vulgar lexis, especially in comments targeting LGBT people). Their pragmatic force is further modified through modal verbs, verbs with negative semantic meaning in the imperative form, (offensive) vocatives, and neologisms. Comments containing HS are marked by a higher degree of creativity and are often based on pseudo-argumentation, which poses challenges for automated HS detection.

Contrary to the previous literature suggesting incompatibility between future and perfective le, this paper presents examples where the three future modals in Mandarin Chinese jiāng, hui and yao are compatible with perfective le under appropriate circumstances. I argue that jiāng, hui and yao are rendered compatible with le if the following conditions hold. First, a reference time is provided to induce a reasonably close specific time for le. Second, the reference time for le must be set to a time other than the present time. If these two conditions are satisfied and no temporal clash arises, future is compatible with the perfective aspect. If a reference time is provided for le but this reference time does not guarantee a reasonable close specific time, then, the future modals need to provide a specific time, in order to go with the perfective aspect.

Study of auxiliaries from a morphological perspective is extremely interesting from the semantic and pragmatic points of view, and they still await detailed and careful study.This paper deals with the role played by auxiliaries in Kannada Morphology. Two kinds of auxiliaries are indicated in the Kannada language, namely, aspect auxiliaries and modal auxiliaries. These auxiliaries are useful information of derivative stems in Kannada verbs. Many of these aspect auxiliaries are used as verbalizers to derive verbs from nouns and verbs from adjectives. Auxiliaries play a very important role in Morphology of Dravidian languages like Kannada. They are useful in the complex verb formation process. Aspect markers have a major role in verb morphology. This paper explores the distribution of non-finite auxiliaries and modal auxiliaries as part of the morphological analyser in Standard Kannada. Auxiliaries form the basis for the formation of multiple stems in Morphology when they are not used separately like in the English language.

Studies in modality comprise a complex canon of functional, formal, sociological and diachronic analyses of language. The current understanding of how English language speakers use modality is unclear; while some research argues that core modal auxiliaries are in decline, they are reported as increasing elsewhere. A lack of contemporary and representative spoken language data has rendered it difficult to reconcile such differing perspectives. To address this issue, this article presents a diachronic study of modality using the Spoken BNC2014 and the spoken component of the BNC1994. We investigate the frequency of core modal auxiliaries, semi-modals, and lexical modality-indicating devices (MIDs), as well as the modal functions of the core modal auxiliaries, in informal spoken British English, between the 1990s and 2010s. The results of the analysis are manifold. We find that core modal auxiliaries appear to be in decline, while semi-modals and lexical MIDs appear relatively stable. However, on a form-by-form basis, there is significant evidence of both increases and decreases in the use of individual expressions within each modal set. As a result, this study problematises form-based studies of change, and illustrates the value and coherence that functional analyses of modality can afford future work.

A recent theory provides a unified cross-linguistic analysis of the interpretations that are assigned to expressions for disjunction, Negative Polarity Items, Free Choice Items, and the non-interrogative uses of wh-phrases in languages such as Mandarin Chinese. If this approach is on the right track, children should be expected to demonstrate similar patterns in the acquisition of these linguistic expressions. Previous research has found that, by age four, children have acquired the knowledge that both the existential indefinite renhe “any” and wh-words in Mandarin Chinese are interpreted as Negative Polarity Items when they are bound by downward entailing operators, but the same expressions are interpreted as Free Choice Items (with a conjunctive interpretation) when they are bound by deontic modals (Mandarin keyi) or by the Mandarin adverbial quantifier dou “all”. The present study extends this line of research to the Mandarin disjunction word huozhe. A Truth Value Judgment Task was used to investigate the possibility that disjunction phrases that are bound by the adverbial quantifier dou generate a conjunctive interpretation in the grammars of Mandarin-speaking 4-year-old children. The findings confirmed this prediction. We discuss the implications of the findings for linguistic theory and for language learnability.

Every language has an array of ways of referring to information source. This may be accomplished with verbs referring to reports, claims, or opinions, with adverbs, with parentheticals, prepositional phrases or with particles. In about one quarter of the world’s languages, marking information source is obligatory. These languages have a grammatical category of evidentiality. Other languages have evidential extensions of non-evidential categories—such as conditional in French, perfect in Georgian and participles in Lithuanian. Just like non-grammatical expressions of information source, evidential extensions of non-evidential categories (known as evidential strategies) share the evidential meanings and not infrequently give rise to grammatical evidentials. The term ‘evidential’ primarily relates to information source as a closed grammatical system whose use is obligatory. The term ‘information source’ relates to the corresponding conceptual category. This is akin to the distinction between the category of ‘tense’, as grammaticalized location in time, and the concept of ‘time’. Expressions related to information source are heterogeneous and versatile. They include closed classes of particles and modal verbs, and an open-ended array of verbs of opinion and belief. The term ‘lexical evidentiality’ is misleading in that it obscures these vital differences. Extra-grammatical ways of marking information source may allow more detailed specification of various degrees of assumption, inference, opinion than do grammatical evidential systems, and often reliability, and speaker’s evaluation of information

In this paper, I analyze the development of the modal verb paradigm from Early Modern Danish to Modern Danish. The Early Modern Danish system is highly polysemous and far from isomorphic in the sense of a harmonious semantic system with one meaning corresponding to one form and vice versa. In comparison to this, the modern system has reduced polysemy through semantic specialization of central modal verbs. The paradigmatic development of the modal verbs from Early Modern Danish to Modern Danish can be understood as a levelling process, consisting of a series of interrelated push chains. This development is conditioned by the frequency of the other modal verbs. It is paradigmatically conditioned in the sense that the diachronic changes undergone by the individual modal verbs are interrelated. Since the development is explained as a frequency effect, the explanation is in line with usage-based approaches.