Evaluative Adverbs Research Articles

Cohérences et communautés linguistiques : les adverbes évaluatifsétrangement,curieusementetparadoxalement

Abstract This study aims at comparing three evaluative adverbs in contemporary French, namelyétrangement,curieusementandparadoxalement, in order to contribute by means of linguistic criteria to their semantic categorization as discourse markers, as well as give account of their points of divergence. The corpus is mainly taken from literary texts, online journalism, digitalized archives fromLe Monde Diplomatique, and includes some built up examples. Our study will be based on the Theory of Stereotypes, with special attention paid to the role of genericity and shared knowledge, and aims at building an explanatory model for the above mentioned adverbs. We will also point out the intervention of a criterium of semantic coherence and/or discursive coherence in their respective functions as modal expressions, as well as the role plaid in the background by one or two linguistic communities in deep structure.

EVALUATIVE LANGUAGE IN BRITISH TOURIST DISCOURSE

The aim of the article is to highlight pragmatic role of evaluative vocabulary in British travel articles. For this purpose, such notions as tourist discourse, evaluative language, pragmatic meaning are defined, main features of tourist discourse are described, pragmatic meaning of evaluative language in travel articles is identified. The research was conducted based on travel articles from the Official Tourism Website of Great Britain www.visitbritain.com. To carry out the research the following methods were used: descriptive, deductive methods as well as elements of functional, discourse, and pragmatic analysis. Tourist discourse combines elements of several discourses, i.e. advertising, popular science and some specific ones. An essential feature of travel articles is the use of positive strategy, aimed at formation of positive attitude of potential tourists towards the tourist object. Such evaluative language means as evaluative attributive word combinations, evaluative adjectives, superlative adjectives, evaluative adverbs, connotatively marked nouns and verbs are used in British tourist articles to fulfill the pragmatic purpose, i.e. to positively impact the potential tourist.

Embedded taste predicates

ABSTRACTWide-ranging semantic flexibility is often considered a magic cure for contextualism to account for all kinds of troubling data. In particular, it seems to offer a way to account for our intuitions regarding embedded perspectival sentences. As has been pointed out by Lasersohn [2009. “Relative Truth, Speaker Commitment, and Control of Implicit Arguments.” Synthese 166 (2): 359â374], however, the semantic flexibility does not present a remedy for all kinds of embeddings. In particular, it seems ineffective when it comes to embeddings under operators with truth evaluative adverbs such as ‘correctly believes that’ and ‘incorrectly believes that’ and under factive verbs. This paper takes a closer look at the problematic embedding data with respect to predicates of personal taste. It argues that there is indeed no semantic solution for contextualism but a pragmatic way out.

The Concept of the Exiled in the Angara Linguoculture

The article features the structure and content of the concept "the exiled" in the Angaralinguoculture. Using conceptual analysis method, the author identified and examined conceptual and value layers of the concept "the exiled" in the oral stories and interviews with the residents of the North Angara river basin (Kezhemsky, Bogychansky and Motyginsky districts of Krasnoyarskregion). The originality of the study is in the fact that it is the first time the concept in question has been investigated on the basis of the Angarabasin residents’ oral stories and interviews. The study was conducted in the frames of the communicative-discursive paradigm of the modern linguistics. Its topicality is based on the fact that the conceptosphere of the Angaralinguoculture remains largely understudied. Moreover, researches of the moral culture of the Angarabasin residents have important sociocultural value since the population was mostly resettled after the construction of the Bogychany hydroelectric power station and flooding of villages in Kezhemsky district of Krasnoyarsk region. The research findings broaden the empirical basis of linguoculturology and communicative dialectology and clarify the peculiarities of the concept "the exiled" in the regional Siberian linguoculture. The author established that the explication of the value layer of the concept «the exiled» was verbalized via evaluative adverbs and adjectives. Positive normative (rationalistic),

‘Doing the devil’: Deriving the PPI-hood of a negation-expressing multi-dimensional idiom

Abstract This paper discusses the German idiomatic expression einen/den Teufel tun ‘do a/the devil’ which is used for emphatic rejection. It is shown that this expression is a PPI, as it cannot occur in the scope of negation. I will motivate that the asserted content of the expression is negation. With German being a non-negative concord language, the co-occurrence of several expressions of negation is usually avoided. This typological fact leads to two different judgement patterns for sentences with einen/den Teufel tun and a negation marker. The expression also contributes a conventional implicature that expresses an attitude of the subject. This conventional implicature shows an interaction with negation similar to that of evaluative adverbs. I will argue that the PPI-hood of the considered expression is fully reducible to its properties as an idiomatic negation marker in a non-negative concord language and its multi-dimensional semantics.

Notes and Reviews. The Concept of Work in Yupik Eskimo Society Before and After the Russian Influx: A Linguist’s Perspective

The Yupik language has a word to signify ‘work’ derived from the stem qepgha(gh) - ( qepghaq ‘work’ [noun], qepghaghtuq ‘he works’, qepghaghta ‘worker’, etc.) The scope of the meaning of this word changed drastically after the Russians came to Chukotka to stay in the 1930s. While in the pre-(intensive) contact times the word mainly meant ‘house work’ or ‘processing the carcass of a killed animal’, in mid-20th century it acquired new meanings, borrowing them from Russian. The usage of the word also became a replica of Russian usage: the concept acquired new dependent words, like evaluative adverbs and adjectives, or inanimate agents. This change of meaning reflected social changes that took place in the Yupik world as a result of the modernisation process of the 1950s and 1960s, and is an indicator of the deep transformation the society underwent under Russian (Soviet) influence. The paper analyses this process using two sources from two different epochs: Yupik texts recorded by Yekaterina Rubtsova in the 1940s, that is, in the pre-(intensive) contact period, and a modern Russian-Yupik dictionary compiled by Natalia Rodionova, a teacher of Yupik Eskimo at the Anadyr college, and published 70 years later, in 2014.

Adverbs in a Learner Corpus: Focusing on Predicational Adverbs

This paper examines the behavior of predicational adverbs in a learner corpus of English, focusing on an overall distributional pattern, the correlation between adverbial meaning and position, and common error types. Two types of essays (argumentative and narrative) produced by university freshmen at two proficiency levels (beginner and high-intermediate) were selected for analysis from the one-million word Yonsei English Learner Corpus (YELC). Notable findings from the analysis include the following: 1) The high level learner corpus, and the argumentative writings within the same level, contained more predicational adverbs, both in diversity and frequency, demonstrating the role of L2 proficiency and text type in the fluency with which the learners employed predicational adverbs. 2) Knowledge of scopal distinction began to emerge, i.e. the distinction between VP-level and S-level adverbs or between speech acts and evaluative adverbs. 3) Errors involving lexical selection were more common than word order errors, corroborating the observation in previous research that lexico-semantic learning trails behind syntactic learning. Considering both the crucial role of adverbial modification as a key to nuance in communication and the difficulty of acquiring lexical selection, it is recommended that more emphasis be given to the lexico-semantic aspects of adverbs in the L2 classroom.

The semantics and pragmatics of directional numeral modifiers

Directional prepositions that can be used as numeral modifiers (directional numeral modifiers or DNMs) are different from other numeral modifiers that set an upper bound in that they set a non-cancellable lower bound, their upper bound is cancellable, they are incompatible with the numeral at the bottom of the scale they quantify over, they are not downward monotone and do not license NPIs, and they interact differently with evaluative adverbs. This paper argues that the cause of all these differences is that DNMs assert a lower bound and implicate an upper bound, and that all class B numeral modifiers require quantification over a range of values. Crosslinguistic data support these claims.

Discriminating CEFR levels in Greek L2: a corpus-based study of young learners’ written narratives

In line with cross-linguistic research aiming at identifying criterial features that discriminate the CEFR proficiency levels, the present study investigates language elements that are core characteristics of each proficiency level for Greek L2. It is based on a graded corpus of 150 written narratives produced by young L2 learners (aged 8–14) at levels A2 to B2. This corpus was annotated with respect to a set of features at both the sentence and discourse level, such as clause subordination, connectives, modifiers and grammatical accuracy. Statistical analysis identified certain aspects of these features that discriminate language proficiency levels in L2 Greek narratives and are put forward as criterial features. These include the frequency of dependent and centre-embedded clauses, the gradual decrease of additive and the emergence of contrastive and inferential connectives, the felicitous use of clitics, as well as the use of evaluative adverbs and adjectives.

Transforming manner adverbs into subject-oriented adverbs: evidence from Japanese

It is well known that some adverbs in English, such as stupidly, cleverly and clumsily, can be interpreted as manner adverbs or agent-oriented adverbs depending on their positions in a sentence, e.g., John danced stupidly vs. Stupidly, John danced. Three approaches are possible and have been proposed for this alternation: (i) positing an agent-oriented adverb as the basic entry from which a manner adverb is derived (Ernst 2002), (ii) positing a manner adverb as the basic entry from which an agent-oriented adverb is derived (McConnell-Ginet 1982), and (iii) positing two distinct lexical entries for the two readings (Pinon 2010). I present data from Japanese which support the second approach. However, there would be a problem if we directly adopt the second approach for the Japanese data, since the adverbs that at first sight look like agent-oriented adverbs in Japanese are not truly ‘agent’-oriented, but rather ‘surface-subject’-oriented. I propose an analysis that does not suffer from this problem, by modifying an idea from McConnell-Ginet (1982) and also incorporating the notion of comparison class from Ernst (2002). The discussion extends to another class of adverbs called ‘evaluative adverbs’, such as fortunately and oddly, which show the same morphological property with surface-subject oriented adverbs in Japanese.

(Non)integrated evaluative adverbs in questions: A cross-Romance study

The goal of this article is to analyze the semantic contribution of evaluative adverbs (EAs) such as unfortunately in several languages of the Romance family, namely French, Catalan, and Spanish. Following Bonami and Godard (2008), we propose to analyze EAs as items that convey projective meaning in order to explain their peculiar semantic behavior (they cannot be directly denied, do not change the truth conditions of the proposition they evaluate, and are not factive) and their unacceptability in negative assertions. Unlike what has been claimed for many other languages, French allows EAs in questions, and we show that Catalan and Spanish do too, as long as some conditions are met. We propose an account that derives their interpretation in both assertions and questions: integrated French EAs take the proposition to their right, and if they appear in a WH -question, their interpretation is similar to that of unconditionals. In contrast, nonintegrated EAs in Catalan and Spanish have scope over a set of propositions, and are acceptable in questions only if the speaker is biased toward one of the propositions in the set denoted by the question. The acceptability of EAs in such questions, rejected by previous literature, is confirmed by an experimental study.

Parentheticals in Underspecified Semantics: The Case of Evaluative Adverbs

Previous studies of parenthetical expressions suffer from not making a clear distinction between prosodic, syntactic, semantic, and illocutionary properties. We distinguish parentheticality, the illocutionary property of providing a comment on the main content of the utterance, from incidentality, the grammatical status of an expression which is set apart prosodically from the rest of the sentence. While incidentality correlates with positional and scopal properties, parentheticality is an orthogonal property with no specific reflex in form. We then discuss the analysis of parentheticality at the syntax semantics interface, focusing on French evaluative adverbs such as bizarrement ‘oddly’. The issue is to model the fact that parenthetical content can appear syntactically embedded, while being interpreted outside of the main content on which it provides a comment. We show that Potts’s analysis [Potts, C. (2005). The logic of conventional implicatures. Oxford University Press], while addressing many of the crucial properties of evaluatives, fails to account for their semantic embeddability. We propose an explicit analysis within an HPSG grammar, based on a modification of MRS (Copestake et al. (2006) Research on Language and Computation, 3, 281–332). In this framework, parenthetical content can be ‘set apart’ from the main semantic composition and interpreted at a higher level. The tight integration of syntax and semantics provided by HPSG allows us to introduce appropriate interface constraints on where this parenthetical content can scope.