1,721,018 research outputs found
The morphological and semantic classification of 'evidentials' and modal verbs in German : the perfect(ive) catalyst
No full textThis paper draws a link between the typological phenomenon of the paradigmatically supported evidentiality evoked by perfect and/or perfectivity and the equally epistemic system of modal verbs in German. The assumption is that, if perfect(ivity) is at the bottom of evidentiality in a wide number of unrelated languages, then it will not be an arbitrary fact that systematic epistemic readings occur also for the modal verbs in German, which were preterite presents originally. It will be demonstrated, for one, how exactly modal verbs in Modem German still betray sensitivity to perfect and perfective contexts, and, second, how perfect(ivity) is prone to evincing epistemic meaning. Although the expectation cannot be satisfied due to a lack of respective data from the older stages of German, a research path is sketched narrowing down the linguistic questions to be asked and dating results to be reached
A response to Cole
No full textMarcelle Cole presents an interesting study of pronominal reference in Old English, nicely supplementing work available in the literature which shows, in brief, that in contexts with more than one possible referent, clause-initial nominative personal pronouns dominantly continue the topic (subject) of the previous clause, whereas clause-initial se-demonstratives dominantly switch the topic to a new referent of the previous clause. Cole adds to this with a study of the overall use of clause-initial pronouns in five Old English texts, which shows more variation than expected on the basis of this literature. Her conclusion is that se-forms by and large pick up discourse-new referents from the previous context. She further claims that her findings highlight how issues pertaining to style, such as the author–writer relationship, text type, subject matter and the conventionalism propagated by text tradition, influence anaphoric strategies in Old English. In this response article. I wish to counterbalance Cole's argument on two points, and make some suggestions for further research, based on recent psycholinguistic work.</jats:p
Historical Change and Syntactic Theory. The Greek article
No full textThe diachronic evolution of the Greek article-system consists of three basic steps:a. rise of the ‘definite’ article;b. rise of the ‘indefinite’ article;c. necessity for the ‘definite’ article to occur with proper names.On the grounds of a parametric description of DP, I suggest that b. and c. follow from the same abstract change, predicting their diachronic relation, and showing that formal analyses of grammatical variation can be successfully applied on historical issues
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