Modal Adverbs Research Articles

U.S. corrections officers’ discourse about dementia

The United States has more prisoners than any other country in the world: more than 1.5 million persons were housed in state and federal prisons in 2020. A sizeable percentage are ageing; Physician’s Weekly estimates that by 2030, people aged over 50, the age at which the incarcerated are considered to be ‘old’, will make up one-third of the U.S. prison population. That group will include a great many persons who have or are developing dementia and who are guarded by correctional officers. We can, then, consider that correctional staff as well as prisoners form an overlooked dementia care minority. Using conversation and discourse analysis, we focus on epistemic modal adverbs as discourse markers in spoken commentary by current correctional officers about prisoners with dementia, as some markers can signal an uneasiness with which they position themselves as knowledgeable about rights and duties in ageing and dementia. Officers frame their discourse to identify concerns about a prison system that deals poorly with inmate losses of cognitive ability and memory and suggest a need for additional training and support in communicating with incarcerated older prisoners who may have dementia.

The Compatible Modes and Functions of Expectation and Anti-expectation Modal Adverbs Within a Sentence

The Compatible Modes and Functions of Expectation and Anti-expectation Modal Adverbs Within a Sentence

Using syntax and semantics to acquire subjective adjective meanings

ABSTRACT Adjectives like good, nice, pretty, and big are among the most frequent adjectives heard by children in the ambient language, and among the first adjectives produced by children. While these gradable adjectives are ostensibly short and sweet, their abstract semantic representations encode reference to features of the discourse context, including speaker subjectivity, which are surprisingly complex, and which also give rise to specific subclasses. How, then, do children acquire these fine-grained adjectival meanings? In this research, we hypothesize that as with verbs, the linguistic environments in which these adjectives appear provide surface-level distributional cues that narrow the space of meaning. In a proof-of-concept experiment with adults following in the footsteps of the Human Simulation Paradigm, we provide empirical evidence that surface-level linguistic patterns support the acquisition of different subclasses of subjective adjectives. Adults were presented with scripted dialogues featuring novel words in controlled linguistic environments manipulating grammatical subjects, adverbial modifiers, standard phrases, syntactic complements, and evidence of faultless disagreement among speakers. Participants were then asked to guess the word meaning (either incrementally after each ‘frame’ or after multiple frames) and rate their confidence. Results, as measured by the percentage of category-consistent, frame-compliant guesses, paired with an increase in confidence levels, indicate a sensitivity to this surface-level information, thereby highlighting the role of the linguistic environment in supporting the acquisition of adjective meaning.

Epistemic Modality in the Inaugural Speeches of Philippine Presidents

This qualitative corpus-based study employing epistemic analysis uncovered the epistemic modality (EM) markers used and their communicative functions in the seven inaugural speeches of the seven Philippine 5th Republic presidents. The findings revealed the preponderant use of epistemic modal verbs with 152 occurrences (81.72%), followed by epistemic lexical verbs with 20 occurrences (10.75%), epistemic modal adverbs with 9 occurrences (4.84%), and epistemic modal adjectives with 5 occurrences (2.69%). Moreover, the top-five modal verbs operated in the presidential inaugurals are will with 97 instances (66.9%), can with 28 instances (19.31%), shall with 9 instances (6.21%), would with 6 instances (4.14%), and could with 5 instances (3.44%). Meanwhile, should and might were never used by any president. In this regard, the presidents are confident, committed, bold, and certain with their statements; some are tentative and quite confident but still communicatively sensitive and polite; and few are uncertain but still diplomatic. Further, the communicative functions of the EM markers were categorized to high-intermediate-low modality values, certain-probable-possible semantic meanings, and close-near-distant epistemic distances.

Epistemic Modality in the Inaugural Speeches of Philippine Presidents

This qualitative corpus-based study employing epistemic analysis uncovered the epistemic modality (EM) markers used and their communicative functions in the seven inaugural speeches of the seven Philippine 5th Republic presidents. The findings revealed the preponderant use of epistemic modal verbs with 152 occurrences (81.72%), followed by epistemic lexical verbs with 20 occurrences (10.75%), epistemic modal adverbs with 9 occurrences (4.84%), and epistemic modal adjectives with 5 occurrences (2.69%). Moreover, the top-five modal verbs operated in the presidential inaugurals are will with 97 instances (66.9%), can with 28 instances (19.31%), shall with 9 instances (6.21%), would with 6 instances (4.14%), and could with 5 instances (3.44%). Meanwhile, should and might were never used by any president. In this regard, the presidents are confident, committed, bold, and certain with their statements; some are tentative and quite confident but still communicatively sensitive and polite; and few are uncertain but still diplomatic. Further, the communicative functions of the EM markers were categorized to high-intermediate-low modality values, certain-probable-possible semantic meanings, and close-near-distant epistemic distances.

Прилагательные английского и русского языков с семантикой предшествования

The aim of the research is to identify the features of the functioning of adjectives in Russian and English that contribute to expressing the semantics of precedence within an utterance. The paper provides an analysis of English and Russian adjectives that realize the semantics of precedence. The study highlights a group of adjectives with the temporal semantics that function as adverbial modifiers expressing precedence at the level of deep structure, while at the level of surface structure, they serve the syntactic function of attributive modifiers. The scientific novelty lies in identifying the spectrum of English and Russian adjectives as non-verbal means of expressing precedence actualizing the temporal semantics of an utterance. It is found that in both languages, adjectives explicitly express the semantics of precedence and at the level of deep structure correspond to adverbs functioning as temporal modifiers. The most frequent adjective in English is ‘previous’, in Russian it is ‘предыдущий’ (previous). Adjectives like ‘former’, ‘бывший’ are characterized by their combination with personal names and organizations to represent their preceding state or position. Allomorphism is manifested in the presence of adjectives with distinctive features expressing precedence.

A labeled magnitude scale for measuring the anticipated impact of immediate experiences

Lundberg et al. (2022) recently developed a rubric for classifying experience impacts as ordinary, meaningful, memorable, or transformative. This article extends that contribution by developing a measure of anticipated impacts suitable for evaluating the anticipated impacts of immediate, structured experiences, such as heritage interpretation experiences, museum visits, and events. We developed a labeled magnitude scale (LMS) by calibrating six adverbial modifiers of impact intensity (negligible, slight, significant, profound, substantial, transformative) to judges’ ratings of ratio-scaled distances. We examined criterion-related evidence of validity using 2,867 experience observations from 594 university students who visited venues selected to advance their emotional connection to their university. Students completed the LMS immediately after their visits, along with measures of hypothesized determinants and results. Findings supported all hypotheses; the LMS yielded scores from which valid inferences may be made about anticipated impacts of immediate, structured experiences.

Семантика и функции шорских маркеров подобия в сфере компаративности

This paper describes the semantics and etymology of comparative operators in the Shor language compared to other Turkic languages. Shor similarity constructions as structures of equality are referred to as “ungraded constructions,” with two components of such a construction being equal or similar. The characterizing component expressed by a noun and marked by a postpositional unit called “an operator” forms a comparative combination. Shor comparative operators exhibit unique features as markers of similarity. Comparative combinations characterizing nouns use the syntactic words tӧӧy, chüünüγ, oshqash, sheni, che, an adjective teƞ, and affixes =tiγ, =tiyi as operators. These combinations can be attributes or predicates in a sentence. The semantic function of these operators is mainly “equative,” covering qualitative and quantitative characteristics. The operators tӧӧy, chüünüγ, teƞ denote a high degree of similarity between objects. The operator oshqash denotes the similarity in the appearance and character of objects. The operators sheni and che designate the equal size of objects. These operators, excluding sheni and che, take predicative affixes in the present indicative tense in the predicate position; otherwise, they are used with an auxiliary verb. The affix =tiγ expresses a comparative meaning in metaphors; otherwise, it denotes the possession of some feature. The affix =tiyi is used in the position of a predicate. Comparative combinations characterizing verbs use the syntactic words chilep (chylap), sheni (shenep, sheninche), and che as operators. These combinations can serve as adverbial modifiers of manner, with their semantic function emphasizing the “similative” identity of the manner of action.

ТЕМПОРАЛЬНАЯ КОРЕФЕРЕНЦИЯ (на материале английского языка)

The article using the material of the English language focuses on studying the issues of temporal coreference. The purpose of the study is to identify the possibilities of implementing temporal coreference using Progressive forms in the English language. In verbal representing temporal reference in English, the referential moment can be expressed by Past Simple, implying a limited interval. These Tense forms may be antecedents for others. The remaining Tenses are anaphoric to it. In case of non-verbal representation of temporal reference, the adverbial modifier of pointed temporal semantics can express the referential moment. Coreference is possible in case of: 1) two non-verbally expressed time intervals, referring to one time interval: the first specifies a larger period, including the second; 2) two verbally expressed intervals; 3) one verbally expressed interval and a second, non-verbally represented. Temporal coreference is represented where a non-verbally expressed referential moment is anaphoric with a time interval verbally implied by predicates in the following Tenses: Past Progressive, Past Simple, Present Progressive, Future Simple. Present Progressive is characterized by coreference with the moment of speech or the present actual moment. Two predicates in Past Progressive and Past Simple can be coreferent to the referential moment represented by the predicate in the Past Simple. Two predicates in Present and Past Progressive can be coreferent provided they are coreferent to the moment of speech or to another moment.

Above and below verbal roots: A case study of English adverbs of results

This study investigates English resultative adverbs focusing on their syntactic peculiarities. Based on the observation that resultative adverbs can appear in certain activity verb phrases, we argue for an elaborate verbal structure. In particular, we propose that two distinct syntactic heads need to be postulated for resultative adverbial modification (Res(ult)) and for encoding the aspectual information of the verb (v). The proposal correctly predicts the distributional contrasts between resultative and manner adverbs, the patterns of adverbs ambivalent in denoting manner and result meanings, and the possibilities of modification of verb and adjective derivatives. The analysis of resultative adverbs advanced in this study is shown to newly account for measure adverbs. In doing so, we demonstrate that certain roots can head-adjoin either to Res or v with the corollary that the resulting verb can either denote a result or manner. Finally, an implication of this study is discussed regarding the relationship between result roots and the Res head.

Co-occurrence of Epistemic Modality in Chinese

In Chinese, epistemic modality expressions include adverbs, auxiliary verbs, and sentence-final particles. This study focuses on the co-occurrence of various degrees of epistemic modality expressions and discusses the effect of their co-occurrence on the likelihood of sentences. First, we collected data on co-occurrence cases of various expressions from a large-scale corpus and analyzed the characteristics of the distribution of these co-occurrence patterns. Second, we examined how modal adverbs and sentence-final particles of different scales of modality affect the likelihood of sentences when they co-occur. We observed that lower certainty expressions precede higher ones, following a hierarchy of Modpossibility > Modprobability > Modcertainty, regardless of their categories. Moreover, the sentence-final particle 吧ba diminishes the likelihood of a proposition, while the sentence-final particle （是）…的 (shi)…de strengthens it. The findings in this study contribute to a deeper understanding of epistemic modality in Chinese and offer novel resources for the acquisition of the language.

“Newspeak” in Contemporary German Political Discourse

This article examines the concept of “newspeak,” created by J. Orwell in his novel “1984,” which functions as one of the means of manipulating the political consciousness of people. The article focuses on the linguistic manifestation of newspeak in the speech behavior of modern German politicians. It reveals two main functions of newspeak in the speech of modern German politicians: confusion and reinterpretation of established concepts. The article explores the corpus of lexical means of German political newspeak, which are realized in the form of framing, empty phrases, paradoxical word constructions, borrowings, neologisms, clericalisms, lexemes with ambiguous meaning, and words with multiple meanings. Among the grammatical means peculiar to newspeak in German political discourse, the article describes the inclusive pronoun “wir,” passive voice, and the conjunctive irrealis in combination with the adverbial modifier of manner. The pragmatic means of realizing newspeak in German political discourse include the imposition of presuppositions, weak efforts to fulfill the intentions, and hyperbolization. The conclusion is drawn that, unlike in totalitarian societies, politicians in democratic countries use newspeak to compensate for the failures of their party, which turns out to be unable to fully implement its declared intentions, mainly through linguistic manipulations.

Alternation Code-mixing of Chhattisgarhi Conversations

This paper investigates alternation code-mixing between Chhattisgarhi and English. It is very common to mix English with the mother tongue in several places across the world. Code-mixing is widely found in multilingual countries like India, where many languages, dialects, and varieties are present. Code-mixing is a very useful strategy for bilingual speakers to communicate easily and effectively based on the context. Our focus is in this study of how alternation code mixing takes place between Chhattisgarhi and English by Chhattisgarhi speakers in their daily conversations. This paper examines conversational code-mixing in the repertoire of Chhattisgarhi speakers, and it also finds out the increasing interest of speakers in the English language. Adopting ideas from Muysken (2000), this paper explores different types of alternation code-mixing such as non-nested switching, peripherality, adverbial modification, coordination, left-dislocation, right-dislocation and emblematic or tag-switches between Chhattisgarhi and English. It examines how different patterns or structures are found in the mixing of these two languages. This study further explains the properties of code-mixing, such as embedding in discourse, doubling, flagging, and dummy insertion in relation to code-mixing of Chhattisgarhi conversations.

Grammaticalization and Lexicalization: A Discourse Analysis of Modality Expressed in English and Romblomanon in Classroom Interaction and Conversation

The Romblomanon language profoundly influenced the learning process of acquiring English as a second language. In this study, the researcher focused on how Romblomanon learners expressed modality in English, which can be defined by grammaticalization (mood, tense, aspect, among others) and lexicalization (modal verbs, modal adverbs, modal adjectives, among others). Romblomanon modality can also be expressed in three universal semantic roles: agent, theme, and location. This study used the qualitative discourse analysis method using the descriptive and contrastive approach to identify English and Romblomanon modals expressed in actual classroom interaction and conversation of Romblomanon students. The recorded conversation and interaction from the two subjects of the students majoring in English enrolled at Romblon State University-Romblon Campus were transcribed and analyzed based on their epistemic and deontic meanings. Results showed that many Romblomanon English learners constructed their statement in Romblomanon and translated itno literally to English statements. It was concluded that the Romblomanon English learners are deeply influenced by their native tongue, resulting in the misuse of modality.

When Modality and Tense Meet. The Future Marker budet ‘will’ in Impersonal Constructions with the Modal Adverb možno ‘be possible’

ABSTRACT This paper examines Russian impersonal constructions with the modal word možno ‘can, be possible’ with and without the future copula budet ‘will be,’ i.e., možno + budet + inf and možno + inf. My contribution can be summarized as follows. First, corpus-based evidence reveals that možno + inf constructions are vastly more frequent than constructions with copula. Second, the meaning of constructions without the future copula is more flexible: while the possibility is typically located in the present, the situation denoted by the infinitive may be located in the present or the future. Third, I show that the možno + inf construction is more ambiguous and can denote present, gnomic or future situations. Fourth, I identify a number of contextual factors that unambiguously locate the situation in the future. I demonstrate that such factors are more frequently used with the future copula, and thus motivate the choice between the two constructions. Finally, I illustrate the interpretations in a straightforward manner by means of schemas of the type used in cognitive linguistics.

Синтаксические функции инфинитива в современном эрзянском языке

The aim of the study is to identify the syntactic functions of the infinitive using the material of one of the Mordovian languages, Erzya. The paper presents the polyfunctionality of this indefinite verb form conditioned by the synthesis of verbal and substantive semes. The study is novel in that it is the first in Mordovian linguistics to describe in detail the syntactic role of the infinitive. As a result, it has been revealed that in the sentence, the infinitive, just like the noun, can perform the functions of all the members of the sentence that are, except for the predicate, unmorphologized. A number of syntactic functions of the infinitive have been commented on. It has been indicated that taking into account the syntactic use, the infinitive is divided into the independent type (the subject of a two-member sentence or the main member of a one-member verbal sentence) and the dependent type (a component of a compound verbal predicate, attribute, object, adverbial modifiers of various categories). It has been determined that the infinitive subordinate to a finite verb form can be a subject infinitive (denotes an action whose subject coincides with the subject of the finite verb form), an object infinitive (indicates an action (state) as the object of activity of someone or something that is not the subject) or a subject-object infinitive (indicates the subject that is the producer of an action that should not be carried out). It has been noted that the infinitive can occupy important communicative positions in the text, bringing emotional coloring to its content.

Thematic separation in light of sentence comprehension

AbstractThematic relations are traditionally analysed as projecting into derivations of sentence meanings from the lexical content of verbs. Thematic separation, a natural outgrowth of event semantics, proposes an alternative to this tradition: thematic relations are introduced into derivations by verb‐independent elements and are, therefore, grammatically separate from the lexical content of verbs. Although critical to theories of meaning and lexical representation, the evidence for thematic separation has not been reckoned with widely in linguistic theory, and the consequent implications for psycholinguistic theories have not received proper consideration. This is surprising as the representations permitted by thematic separation comport quite well with evidence for pre‐verbal thematic interpretation during real‐time sentence comprehension. Psycholinguistic theories, therefore, stand to benefit from engagement with separationist alternatives to thematic relations, and may, in turn, shed light on the representations semantic theory should provide. After briefly defending the utility of events in semantic representation, this paper motivates thematic separation with evidence from the cumulative interpretations and adnominal modal adverbs; two cases where a semantic operator intervenes between a thematic relation and a verbal predicate. Psycholinguistic results investigating pre‐verbal thematic interpretation then follow, where thematic separation is argued to furnish theories with coherent incremental representations without commitment to specific verbal predicates. The timecourse of verb predictability is also shown to intersect with ongoing debates on the granularity of thematic relations, suggesting further connections between semantic and psycholinguistic theory to be explored.

Telicity judgments in L2 English by L1 Slovak speakers

Abstract The study investigates the acquisition of telicity in L2 English by L1 Slovak speakers as a function of L2 proficiency (measured by a cloze test score), exposure (operationalized as length of stay in an English-speaking country) and instruction type (monolingual vs. bilingual). Telicity judgments were collected from Slovak learners of L2 English (n = 50) and a control group of American English native speakers (n = 15) in two offline acceptability judgment tasks. Two types of telicity encoding were examined: (1) the contribution of the [±quantized] feature of the object argument to predicate telicity, which involves processes in narrow syntax; and (2) the contribution of adverbial modifiers to telicity interpretations, including coercion contexts, which involve processes of aspectual reinterpretation. Based on previous research, it was hypothesized that the contribution of the [±quantized] feature of the object argument to predicate telicity, which is a syntactic phenomenon, will be easier to acquire than aspectual coercion by means of adverbial modifiers, which relies on pragmatic cues. The results indicate that the most significant predictor of telicity judgments based on syntactic cues is L2 proficiency, while length of stay affects telicity judgments in predicate categories involving coercion contexts.

Spatial Adverbs in Laz

Laz spatial adverbs are notional lexical items making up rather numerous and semantically diverse groups. They play a significant role in linguistic representation of spatial structures determining in which circumstances and with what features an action, conveyed by a verb, proceeds. They are satellites outside a verb stem; in sentences, they occur as adverbial modifiers and convey space-related information: direction of movement and place of localization of bodies. The function of an adverb is to establish: location of a figure when it is immobile, beginning of action, point of departure, orientation towards the final point of motion, either to determine a target point or convey terminativity, approaching that point . In Laz, adverbs occur as three different patterns:  Simple, that is, primary, basic patterns; Derived - patterns formed by means of case markers, particles, postpositions, preverbs and other affixes; Compound – by means of various types of reduplication. Formal structures of adverbs reflect their semantic structures; for instance, derived adverbs are sequences of functional elements, being associated with representation diverse structures of semantic components: direction and area, localization, starting, target and terminal points, arrangement of objects in an area, topology of place, widening-narrowing of an area, visualization, reference-orientation.

Italian davvero (‘really’) as a trigger of implicit contents in persuasive discourse

It is generally maintained that, as a modal adverb, Italian davvero ‘really’ signals a high degree of certainty attributed by the speaker to the modified linguistic material, or expresses a positive evaluation. Differently from other modal adverbs, in its absolute use, davvero can react to an interlocutor’s statement, reinforcing it or questioning it, thus expressing a judgement on an already existing assertion. In political monologues, we observe that the existence of an “interlocutor’s voice” responsible for an asserted content can be presupposed, with davvero being the trigger of such presupposition. In such cases, a second implicit content (a conversational implicature) is also generally conveyed which expresses the epistemic judgement of the speaker. We observe that this happens typically in some specific discourse configurations (i.e., questions and conditional subordinates) and we label this pragmatic enrichment ‘polemic polyphonic judgement’. We also show the manipulative potential of this pragmatic phenomenon. We finally suggest that davvero can trigger a conversational implicature also in other linguistic configurations, and we propose that context, and more specifically the stretch of text in which the adverb occurs, whether argumentative or non-argumentative, plays a crucial role in this pragmatic process.