Evidentials And Modals

Evidentials and Modals offers an in-depth account of the meaning of grammatical elements related to evidentiality and modality, focusing on both theoretical and typological perspectives, ranging from Korean, Japanese, American Indian, Turkish and African languages.

The book presents new issues and areas of work in modality and evidentiality in English(es), and in relation to other European languages (French, Galician, Lithuanian, Spanish). Given the complexity of the relations among modal and evidential expressions, their constant diachronic evolution, and the variation found in different English-speaking areas, and in different genres and discourse domains, the volume addresses the following issues: the conceptual nature of modality, the relationship between the domains of modality and evidentiality, the evolution and current status of the modal auxiliaries and other modal expressions, the relationship with neighbouring grammatical categories (tense, aspect, mood), and the variation in different discourse domains and genres, in modelling stance and discourse identities.

This volume offers a thorough, systematic, and crosslinguistic account of evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. In some languages, the speaker always has to specify this source - for example whether they saw the event, heard it, inferred it based on visual evidence or common sense, or was told about it by someone else. While not all languages have obligatory marking of this type, every language has ways of referring to information source and associated epistemological meanings. The continuum of epistemological expressions covers a range of devices from the lexical means in familiar European languages and in many languages of Aboriginal Australia to the highly grammaticalized systems in Amazonia or North America. In this handbook, experts from a variety of fields explore topics such as the relationship between evidentials and epistemic modality, contact-induced changes in evidential systems, the acquisition of evidentials, and formal semantic theories of evidentiality. The book also contains detailed case studies of evidentiality in language families across the world, including Algonquian, Korean, Nakh-Dagestanian, Nambikwara, Turkic, Uralic, and Uto-Aztecan.

In spite of the vast literature on modality in English, very little research has been done on modal adverbs as a group. While there are studies of individual adverbs, the semantic and pragmatic relations between them have been left largely unexplored. This book takes a close look at the whole field of modal certainty as expressed by adverbs in English. On the basis of corpus data the most frequent adverbs of certainty, including certainly, indeed, and no doubt, are examined from the point of view of their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics. The corpus used is the International Corpus of English - Great Britain, supplemented by data from other present-day English corpora, and questionnaires testing native speakers' intuitions on fine-grained similarities and differences between closely related adverbs. The methodology also includes the study of cross-linguistic equivalents as indicators of semantic-pragmatic relations between adverbs. Translation corpora yield correspondences in Swedish, Dutch, French and German. A detailed study of those correspondences adds useful information for setting up a semantic-pragmatic profile of each adverb, showing where their meanings overlap and where the boundaries are. The concept of semantic maps is relied on for plotting these relations. The book not only provides a thorough empirical study of English adverbs expressing certainty, it also contributes to a better theoretical understanding of the complexity of modal certainty, how it is related to speakers' goals and to other semantic areas. It is the first in-depth study of this kind, combining rich information on English as well as opening up perspectives for further empirical and theoretical research into modality.

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 comprehensive review and critical synthesis of research on modality focuses on formal theories within linguistics and related aspects of philosophical logic. It will be welcomed by students of linguistics at graduate level and above, as well as by researchers in philosophy, computational science, and related fields.

Statements are always under the threat of the potential counter-question How do you know? To pre-empt this question, language users often indicate what kind of access they had to the communicated content: Their own perception, inference from other information, ‘hearsay’, etc. Such expressions, grammatical or lexical, have been studied in recent years under the cover term of evidentiality research. The present volume contributes 11 new studies to this flourishing field, all exploring evidential phenomena in a range of languages (Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Khalkha Mongolian, Spanish, Tibetan, Yurakaré), using a variety of methodologies. Evidential meaning is discussed in relation to other semantic dimensions, such as epistemic modality, semantic roles, commitment, quotative meaning, and tense. The volume is of interest to scholars and students who are interested in up-to-date methods and frameworks for studying evidential meaning and the various ways it is expressed in the languages of the world.

The main topics pursued in this volume are based on empirical insights derived from Germanic: logical and typological dispositions about aspect-modality links. These are probed in a variety of non-related languages. The logically establishable links are the following: Modal verbs are aspect sensitive in the selection of their infinitival complements – embedded infinitival perfectivity implies root modal reading, whereas embedded infinitival imperfectivity triggers epistemic readings. However, in marked contexts such as negated ones, the aspectual affinities of modal verbs are neutralized or even subject to markedness inversion. All of this suggests that languages that do not, or only partially, bestow upon full modal verb paradigms seek to express modal variations in terms of their aspect oppositions. This typological tenet is investigated in a variety of languages from Indo-European (German, Slavic, Armenian), African, Asian, Amerindian, and Creoles. Seeming deviations and idiosyncrasies in the interaction between aspect and modality turn out to be highly rule-based.