1,721,032 research outputs found
Pragmatic functions in Brazilian Portuguese:A Functional Discourse Grammar account
Full text linkThis study concerns the possibilities of expressing the pragmatic functions of topic and focus on subject referents of transitive clauses in Portuguese as spoken in Brazil, compared with the European varieties of Spanish and Portuguese. Spoken Brazilian Portuguese is developing an innovative topic marker for referents with subject function, which consists of the redundant use of a personal pronoun that immediately follows the subject NP, but it has only very restricted possibilities of expressing the focus function. European Portuguese lacks specific expressions for both pragmatic functions. Spanish differs from Portuguese in being able to express focus by placing the grammatical subject in clause final position; but it does not have an analogous expression of the topic function. The present paper describes the origin of the topic marker in Brazilian Portuguese, explains its functionality, and ends with a comparison of the possible expressions of topic and focus in the European varieties of the two Ibero-Romance languages and Brazilian Portuguese. The paper is concerned exclusively with transitive verbal expressions in which both arguments have third person referents
Objective and subjective deontic modality in FDG: evidence from Spanish auxiliary expressions
No full textThe theory of FDG claims that deontic modality can be either participant-oriented or event-oriented, both distinctions forming part of the Represent¬ational Level. However, there is evidence from Spanish and a number of other languages that event-oriented deontic modality can be coded twice with different values in one and the same state of affairs. We will therefore distinguish between objective and subjective deontic modality, where the latter has scope over the former. On the basis of the ways in which the expressions of subjective and objective deontic modality interact with tense, and other modal distinctions, we will propose a refinement of the internal structure of the Representational Level in order to accommodate this distinction
Casebook in functional discourse grammar
No full textThis book provides ten case studies in Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), a typologically-oriented theory of the organization of natural languages that has risen to prominence in recent years. The authors, all committed practitioners of FDG, include Kees Hengeveld, the intellectual father of the theory, who shows how it offers a radically new approach to constituent ordering. Other themes covered are evidentiality, modality, adpositions, verb morphology, possession, raising, sequence of tenses, semi-fixed constructions and prelinguistic conceptualization. The volume contains an introduction that explains the rudiments of FDG and summarizes the ten remaining chapters. The Casebook moves on from Hengeveld & Mackenzie’s (2008) Functional Discourse Grammar to show how the theory is applied to linguistic problems new and old. The languages treated are Blackfoot, Dutch, English, Spanish, Welsh, indigenous languages of Brazil, and many others
The grammaticalization of Dutch moeten: modal and post-modal meanings
Full text linkThis chapter provides a synchronic and diachronic description of the Dutch modal moeten, which means ‘must’ in Modern Dutch. The synchronic description combines Narrog’s (2005) distinction between volitive and non-volitive modality with Hengeveld’s (2004) approach to modality, which subcategorizes modal distinctions according to their domains and their targets. It is shown that moeten can be used to express all of these distinctions, although it is rare in the function of objective epistemic modality. The diachronic description focuses on deontic moeten and post-deontic non-modal meanings. It consists of two parts, the first describing the Old Dutch moeten ‘may’ and its development into an expression of optative illocution in Middle Dutch, as well as its semantic shift to modal necessity. In this context Nuyts’ (2011, 2013) claim, according to which moeten has been undergoing a process of degrammaticalization from Middle Dutch onward, is critically evaluated. The second part of the diachronic description of moeten is dedicated to a 20th century innovation which consists of the use of moeten in an imperative-like construction. The chapter ends with a synthesis of the changes undergone by moeten from Old Dutch onward making use of the Functional Discourse Grammar approach to grammaticalization (Hengeveld this volume)
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