Aspects Of Tenses Modality And Evidentiality

"If there's a domain in linguistics which complexity calls for ever further research, it's clearly that of tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality, often referred to as 'TAME'. The reason for which these domains of investigation have been connected so tightly as to deserve a common label is that their actual intertwining is so dense that one can hardly measure their effects purely individually, without regard to the other notions of the spectrum. On the other hand, despite their imbrications, tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality remain - needless to say - separate theoretical entities. The papers gathered in this volume cover a range of issues and a variety of methods that help delineate, each in its way, new perspectives on this broad domain"--

This book brings together a series of contributions to the study of grammaticalization of tense, aspect, and modality from a functional perspective. All contributions share the aim to uncover the functional motivations behind the processes of grammaticalization under discussion, but they do so from different points of view.

After an introductory chapter that provides an overview to theoretical issues in tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality, this volume presents a variety of original contributions that are firmly empirically-grounded based on elicited or corpus data, while adopting different theoretical frameworks. Thus, some chapters rely on large diachronic corpora and provide new qualitative insight on the evolution of TAM systems through quantitative methods, while others carry out a collostructional analysis of past-tensed verbs using inferential statistics to explore the lexical grammar of verbs. A common goal is to uncover semantic regularities and variation in the TAM systems of the languages under study by taking a close look at context. Such a fine-grained approach contributes to our understanding of the TAM systems from a typological perspective. The focus on well-known Indo-European languages (e.g. French, German, English, Spanish) and also on less commonly studied languages (e.g. Hungarian, Estonian, Avar, Andi, Tagalog) provides a valuable cross-linguistic perspective.

This book deals with the linguistic treatment of tense-aspect-modal-evidential (TAME) expressions in translations of the French novel L’Étranger by Albert Camus into sixteen languages. It is strongly empirical in spirit, and uses the method of contrastive linguistics and multilingual comparison through the use of parallel corpora. It has five main parts: the first two offer insights into perfect and imperfect tenses in Indo-European languages; the third part shifts the focus on non Indo-European languages; the fourth part deals with modality, and the last part is more translation-oriented. These contents make this book a valuable contribution in semantic micro-typology. In terms of readership, both linguists and specialists in translation, as well as literature scholars, can benefit from the contributions presented in this book. It also relates to other usage-based, corpus-driven studies of TAME phenomena, and to monographs that take as their object of study the use of corpus linguistics in translation studies.

This monograph explores the tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality of Korean, which has a rich verbal inflectional system, and proposes novel treatments within the framework of compositional semantics. One of the major contributions is the demonstration that Korean has two types of deictic tense—simple deictic and spatial deictic tense. Spatial deictic tense refers to the notion of the speaker's 'perceptual field' (or deictic range), as well as to temporality, functioning to set up a condition for a systematic evidential distinction. The research in this volume shows that the basic paradigm of evidentiality of Korean derives from the standard TMA system combined with the notion of space. This volume also shows that perfect and past tense utilize different primitives. The intended readership of this volume extends beyond Koreanists to scholars interested specifically in tense, mood, aspect, and evidentiality as well as in general theories of grammar and semantics-pragmatics.

This book explores the semantics of tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality in the North-East Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian) language family. It offers an overview of the most challenging features and provides in-depth studies of selected TAME systems in a number of languages.

Syntax – the study of sentence structure – has been at the centre of generative linguistics from its inception and has developed rapidly and in various directions. The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides a historical context for what is happening in the field of generative syntax today, a survey of the various generative approaches to syntactic structure available in the literature and an overview of the state of the art in the principal modules of the theory and the interfaces with semantics, phonology, information structure and sentence processing, as well as linguistic variation and language acquisition. This indispensable resource for advanced students, professional linguists (generative and non-generative alike) and scholars in related fields of inquiry presents a comprehensive survey of the field of generative syntactic research in all its variety, written by leading experts and providing a proper sense of the range of syntactic theories calling themselves generative.