Modal Meanings Research Articles

From conditionality to modality in Luganda (Bantu, JE15): A synchronic and diachronic corpus analysis of the verbal prefix -andi-

This article offers a synchronic and diachronic analysis of the use and meaning of the verbal prefix -andi- in the Great Lakes Bantu language Luganda (JE15). On the basis of a text corpus of 4 million tokens, we show that the prefix, commonly described as a conditional marker, is primarily involved in the expression of modal meanings, specifically deontic necessity and epistemic possibility. Our thirteen-decade diachronic corpus analysis shows that there is a relationship between the increased use of -andi- outside syntactically complex conditional constructions, i.e. those having both a protasis and an apodosis, and an increase in its expression of modal meanings. Moreover, a reduction in the use of -andi- in complex conditional constructions goes hand in hand with a reduction in its expression of conditional meanings. It is further revealed that contrary to the common cross-linguistic tendency to rely on modality as a source for conditionality, the conditional meaning of -andi- is not post-modal. Instead it was primarily a conditional marker, which subsequently developed different modal meanings.

НЕМЕЦКИЕ ДИСКУРСИВНЫЕ ЧАСТИЦЫ В СТРУКТУРЕ ПОЛЯ МОДАЛЬНОСТИ

The article identifies the place of discursive particles in the structure of functional-semantic field of modality. The authors show that the German discursive particles can transfer epistemic and deontic semantics. It allows referring them to the sphere of modal meanings. The peculiarity of discursive particles lies in the fact that specificity of modal meanings is determined only by contextual surroundings. Discursive particles do not appear in all types of texts and can’t be considered frequent, that’s why they can be referred to as periphery components of functional-semantic field of modality.

DYNAMIC MODALS – ENGLISH AND SERBIAN CONTRASTED

The current study attempts to investigate the semantic domain of dynamic modality in English and Serbian by focusing on the dynamic modals in English and their translation equivalents in Serbian. It tends to fill the existing research gap regarding a comprehensive contrastive analysis tackling all dynamic modality subtypes in the investigated languages. Cross-linguistically, modality is expressed by different grammatical categories with a tendency for typologically related languages to convey modal meanings by similar devices. We expect the analysis to show that both English and Serbian have grammatical devices to express dynamic modal meanings and that dynamic modality is expressed in similar ways in the two languages. Two complementary objectives underlie the analysis: to identify and provide an account of the devices used to express dynamic modality in English and Serbian and to compare and contrast the two languages. The unilateral contrastive analysis, guided by the principles set in Đorđević (1994), used a semantically based tertium comparationis, i.e. the principle of translation equivalence seen in terms of semantic equivalence. The analysis was carried out on the corpus compiled for these purposes comprising the excerpted examples from two novels by Kazuo Ishiguro (Ishiguro 2005, 2016) and their published Serbian translations (Išiguro 2003; Ишигуро 2009).

ЧИСЛІВНИК ЯК ДИСКУРСИВНЕ СЛОВО В ПОЕЗІЇ ШІСТДЕСЯТНИКІВ

W artykule poddano analizie pragmatyczny charakter wyrazów dyskursywnych, ustalono znaczeniową zawartość liczebnika jako słowa dyskursywnego w poetyckich tekstach L. Kostenko. Na przykładzie liczebnika “один” wykazano, iż w dyskursie poetyckim traci on swoje znaczenie pierwotne, nabywa zaś zaimkowych znaczeń deiktyczności, przymiotnikowych znaczeń określenia, jakości, oceny czy modalnych znaczeń, właściwych partykułom.

Prepositional Word Combinations with modal meaning

Prepositional Word Combinations with modal meaning

Моделі рефлективізації контамінованої волітивності у діалогічному мовленні (на матеріалі висловлень-квестивів іспанською мовою)

The article deals with the problem of simulation of the model of reflectivisation of contaminated volition. The article offers a new approach towads the concept of "contaminated volition" under the criteria of differentiation of lacunae in the epistemic domain of the subject of contaminated volition and its affective states. There have been differentiated certain types of consciousness – the epistemic sphere, which acts as the authority of the modal estimation, which is the basis of the simulation of the reflection of contaminated volition. According to the analysis of the correlations between the nature of the contamination of the volition, the individual sphere of consciousness, causing the modal estimation, and the means of their speech expression, the study discusses the biases in the non-prototype modal estimation of the volition through a series of gradual transitions in the continuum of modal meanings: the possibility – objective probability – subjective probability (chance) – a negative possibility.

Reconstructing the origins of the Luganda (JE15) modal auxiliaries -sóból- and -yînz-: A historical-comparative study across the West Nyanza Bantu cluster

In this article, a comparison is made of the expression of possibility in West Nyanza Bantu languages in order to reconstruct the origins of Luganda’s two most frequent possibility markers, viz. the near-synonymous auxiliaries -sóból- and -yînz-. Earlier Luganda diachronic corpus-driven analyses showed that -yînz- has been involved in expressing all possibility categories since the 1890s, which is when Luganda was first reduced to writing, while -sóból- acquired deontic possibility as a meaning only in the 1950s. Although this would suggest that -yînz- is the possibility marker with the greatest time depth in Luganda and across West Nyanza, with -sóból- a relative newcomer, the comparative data which is presented in this article indicates the opposite. It is shown that while -yînz- only exists in some West Nyanza languages (namely in the subgroup which includes Luganda, Lusoga and Lugwere), -sóból- is attested in all West Nyanza languages as well as in other Great Lakes Bantu languages outside West Nyanza. The fact that the cognates of -sóból- in all Great Lakes Bantu languages carry a dynamic modal meaning ‘be able’ suggests that its modal usage is older in any of the individual languages considered here than what language-internal Luganda data seems to suggest.

A corpus-based study of the Latvian debitive vs vajadzēt

A corpus-based study of the two main verbal expressions of necessity in Latvian shows that the much more frequent debitive is commonly used in the present tense without negation while the less frequent vajadzēt is usually found in the subjunctive. An analysis of randomly selected examples of the present, past and future tense and the subjunctive demonstrates an almost identical distribution of deontic and dynamic uses of both modals with respects to grammatical forms without negation. With negation, there is a striking difference between vajadzēt, expressing prohibitions and criticism of past actions, and the debitive, conveying lack of necessity. The article also provides a discussion on how to distinguish between various types of modal meanings in authentic examples from a corpus.

구어에서 운율 표지와 형태 표지의 분포와 기능

This paper aims at investigating the prosodic markers and morphological markers in spoken Korean. Prosody, especially intonation, has linguistic and paralinguistic meanings in spoken Korean. As is well-known, prosody plays important role in spoken language: it is hard to determine whether a word(or a eojeol) is realized at the sentence final or non-final position without consulting the prosody. Only an exception is that a word(or eojeol) ends with a typical sentence final ending such as ‘–다, -냐, -라, -자’. Therefore, we can categorize two types of endings in Korean: clause terminal endings and sentence terminal endings. A eojeol with a clause terminal ending, which is categorized as a connective ending in the previous studies, terminates a sentence only with a terminal boundary tone. It does not terminates a sentence with a non-terminal boundary tone. On the other hand, a eojeol with a sentence terminal ending, which is categorized as a terminal ending in the previous studies, always terminates a sentence with a unmarked terminal boundary tone. The unmarked terminal boundary tone depends on the ending types: H% for the interrogative ending (e.g. {-냐), L% for the rests. Marked terminal boundary tone with sentence terminal ending only changes paralinguistic modal meaning of the sentence. It does not change the linguistic category of the sentence type, which is realized with the morphological marker(i.e. sentence terminal ending type). Only paralinguistic modal meaning changes in this case. On the other hand, when a eojeol does not end with a sentence terminal ending, a sentence can close off with terminal boundary tone and cannot close off with non-terminal boundary tone. In this case, terminal boundary tone can have linguistic meaning as well as paralinguistic modal meaning.

A Study on the Development of Sentence Final Endings ‘–ngeol’, ‘–lgeol’

This thesis aims mainly to argue the development of sentence final endings ‘-ngeol’, ‘-lgeol’ from noun phrase complement constructions ‘-n geoseul’, ‘-l geoseul’. In chapter 2 and 3, I present that ‘-ngeol’, ‘-lgeol’ has the function as conjunctive endings and sentence final endings mainly in premodern Korean. And especially I explain that ‘-l geoseul’ has various modal meanings such as speculation, regret, and duty through irrealis marker ‘-l’. Also ‘-ngeol’, ‘-lgeol’ and ‘-l geoseul’, -n geoseul’ coexit in modern Korean, and I explain this phenomenon as layering, one of the principles of grammaticlaization. I discuss that the development of ‘-ngeol’, ‘-lgeol’ is related to the sentence that has rhetorical interrogative, and inversion of antecedent and following clause. Finally, I compare ‘-ngeol’, ‘-lgeol’ with other conjunctive endings including accusative case marker ‘-l’.

Causes and Expectations: On the Interpretation of the Tagalog Ability/Involuntary Action Form

The Tagalog Ability / Involuntary Action (AIA) verbal form conveys apparently unrelated modal meanings: that an action was within what an agent could do or that it was beyond what an agent could control, for instance. Recent analyses for the Malagasy and St’át’imcets counterparts of this form propose that this morphology contributes circumstantial modality and conveys, roughly, that the event that it describes follows from a set of facts (Davis, Matthewson & Rullmann 2009; Paul, Ralalaoherivony & de Swart 2016). In Alonso-Ovalle & Hsieh forthcoming we discuss some challenges for extending this type of analysis to Tagalog. Here, we present an alternative proposal. We follow previous analyses in assuming that the AIA form projects its domain of possibilities from a set of facts, but depart from these analyses in proposing (i) that the modal component of the Tagalog AIA form is non-at-issue and (ii) that it conveys, via a presupposition, that, given the facts that the described event is assumed to causally depend on, this event was not expected.

Content in a Dynamic Context

AbstractThe standing tradition in theorizing about meaning, since at least Frege (1882), identifies meaning with propositions, which are, or determine, the truth‐conditions of a sentence in a context. But a recent trend has advocated a departure from this tradition: in particular, it has been argued that modal claims do not express standard propositional contents. This non‐propositionalism has received different implementations in expressivist semantics (Moss, 2015; Swanson, 2006; Yalcin, 2007) and certain kinds of dynamic semantics (Gillies, 2004, 2010; von Fintel and Gillies, 2007; Veltman, 1985, 1996). They maintain that the key aspect of interpretation of modal claims is the characteristic dynamic effect they have on the context. I argue that pessimism about truth‐conditions arises from an overly simplistic picture of content, context and their interaction. While I agree with the critics that an important aspect of modal meaning is the dynamic effect modals have on the context, I argue that they have mischaracterized the nature and the complexity of this effect. A more nuanced account of the interaction between modals and context shows that far from being incompatible with propositional meaning, the dynamic aspect of meaning is precisely what allows us to predict the correct propositional content of an utterance.

Methods of Modality Transmission within Intercultural Communication

The main idea of the research is the specifics of modality expression in English compared with the Russian language. Therefore, this analysis helps us not only to understand the nature of modality, but also the ways of its expression. For this purpose, the study benefits from comparative analysis methodology. The analysis of similarities and differences in the category of modality in English and Russian languages, translation techniques of modal meanings are investigated in the article. The article contributes to the expansion and deepening of modality linguistic concepts. Materials of the article can be useful in practice of teaching English, especially on the practical classes in translation and in further development of theoretical issues of language modality.

Condicional e 'ir' no Imperfeito + Infinitivo: questões de temporalidade e de modalidade

In European Portuguese, both the Condicional (approximately corresponding to the English structure would + Infinitive) and the construction ir (‘go’) in the Imperfect + Infinitive express posteriority with respect to a given past interval. In this paper, I show that, in spite of their seemingly similar behaviour, these two forms diverge in a number of significant aspects. In particular, and taking into account the analysis of contexts such as if-clauses and some subordinate complement clauses introduced by factive and intensional verbs, I will argue that, while the Condicional is mainly used to provide modal information, even losing its basic temporal value, the structure ir (‘go’) in the Imperfect + Infinitive always induces a temporal relation of futurity in a past domain, irrespective of the possible modal meanings accompanying it.

陸中宮古方言における「終止長音」の機能 : 文末イントネーションによる表現の一例として( 東日本の音声)

陸中宮古方言における「終止長音」の機能 : 文末イントネーションによる表現の一例として( 東日本の音声)

Epistemic Modals and Alternative Possibilities

Indicative judgments pertain to what is true. Epistemic modal judgments pertain to what must or might be true relative to a body of information. A standard view is that epistemic modals implicitly quantify over alternative possibilities, or ways things could turn out. On this view, a proposition must be true just in case it is true in all the possibilities consistent with the available information, and a proposition might be true just in case it is true in at least one possibility consistent with the available information. I report three experiments testing this view of epistemic modals. The results show that although modal judgments are sensitive to information about alternative possibilities, the standard quantification theory mischaracterizes the ordinary meaning of modals. I then report two more experiments testing the hypothesis that epistemic modals express willingness to attribute knowledge based on the available information. The results support this hypothesis. The results also show that the difference between “inside” and “outside” probabilistic information, familiar from the judgment and decision-making literature, affects epistemic modal judgments.

Coerced Relative Clauses in Korean

In this paper, I use the following abbreviations: acc(usative case), (imperfective) adni(ominal), (modal) adnm (ominal ending), (perfective) adnp(ominal ending), c(o)mp(lementizer), dec(larative mood), imp(er)f(ective as- pect), n(or)m(ina)l(izer), nom(inativecase), p(a)st, pl(ural), top(ic). The morpheme nun occurs with an eventive verb and expresses imperfectiveness of the event it denotes. If (u)n is used with an eventive verb, it expresses the perfectiveness of the event that the verb denotes. But it can occur with a stative verb with no meaning of perfectiveness. In addition to the two, the adnominal ending -(u)l often expresses a modal meaning, but there are cases it does not have any meaning of modality: e.g. … (u)l ttay ‘when …’.

STRUCTURAL-SEMANTIC TYPES OF THE COMBINATION OF THE VERB LASSEN WITH AN INFINITIVE

The article examines the combination of the German verb lassen with an infinitive as an entire infinitival structure, where each component influences the creation of grammatical meanings of the whole structure. On the basis of this point of view the structural components which determine the meanings are analysed and described. Such factors as the lexical realization of a subject, presence and the lexical and morphological realization of an object, as well as the transitivity of a verb in an infinitival form are recognized to be significant. These characteristics of the structure-building components allow us to single out six models of the infinitival structure with lassen and describe their meanings and their forming mechanisms. The research has shown that the main modal meanings (causativeness, permissiveness and possibility) are specified according to structure-building components, such as: verbal and non-verbal causation, permissiveness, intentional or involuntary allowance of action, order, wish and reason. Some of them combine with the passive meaning.

Interpretability suprema in Peano Arithmetic

This paper develops the philosophy and technology needed for adding a supremum operator to the interpretability logic mathsf {ILM} of Peano Arithmetic (mathsf {PA}). It is well-known that any theories extending mathsf {PA} have a supremum in the interpretability ordering. While provable in mathsf {PA}, this fact is not reflected in the theorems of the modal system mathsf {ILM}, due to limited expressive power. Our goal is to enrich the language of mathsf {ILM} by adding to it a new modality for the interpretability supremum. We explore different options for specifying the exact meaning of the new modality. Our final proposal involves a unary operator, the dual of which can be seen as a (nonstandard) provability predicate satisfying the axioms of the provability logic mathsf {GL}.

THE SUBJECTIVE USE OF POSTURAL VERBS IN AFRIKAANS (II): A CORPUS ANALYSIS OF CPV EN IN ZEFRIKAANS

A general linguistic use of progressive aspect is to express some kind of subjective meaning. In other words, this aspectual construction is applied to postulate the speaker’s attitude towards or emotional involvement with a particular situation. Although this practice occurs in all three Afrikaans progressive constructions, it is clear that the postural progressive in Afrikaans in particular became specialised with respect to subjective expression. The CPV [1] en construction is even used in contexts where its meaning cannot be interpreted as progressive (for example, stative or anterior situation types), and furthermore this construction collocates significantly strongly with negative communication verbs (verbs like skinder (''gossip''), kla (''complain'') and pla (''bother''). The subjective use of progressive constructions in Afrikaans has not received much attention to date. In two complementary articles (this article and The subjective use of postural verb in Afrikaans (I): evolution from progressive to modal ) the development and use of the CPV en as subjective or interpretative construction, are investigated. The purpose of this second article is to conduct a corpus investigation in a corpus that is appropriate for optimally examining the subjective use of the CPV en construction potential, namely a recent Afrikaans corpus characterised by non-standard, informal, spoken or language . The Watkykjy.co.za Corpus 1.0 (2015), as a corpus of “Zefrikaans” is examined for this purpose. Whereas the first article focused on the development of the postular construction to express subjective or modal meaning, the purpose of this article is to investigate the use of the subjective CPV en . From a grammaticalisation perspective, it is indicated that the different frequency relations are a first strong indication that CPV en has been further grammaticalised in Zefrikaans than in Standard Afrikaans, and that the modal and subjective use of the construction is therefore probably also applied more productively in Zefrikaans. Secondly, a collexeme analysis is done of the main verbs that collocate with CPV en and it is found that the Zefrikaans construction, similar to the manner in it is used in Standard Afrikaans, collocates significantly strongly with seven verb categories, namely with verbs i) social interaction; ii) creative activity; iii) perception; iv) cognitive activity; v) biology; vi) inactivity; and vii) negative communication. In the Zefrikaans collocation list, however, there are many words with a strong modal or interpretive undertone, that are non-standard or informal, or can even be regarded as vulgar, crude and inappropriate. The results of the corpus investigation confirmed that the CPV en construction mainly occurs in non-standard, informal, spoken or conversational Afrikaans . [1] The term CPV refers to cardinal postural verbs which (commonly) profiles the Agent as assuming one of the [three] cardinal postures when carrying out the (Lemmens 2005:1). In this article the four postural verbs sit 'sit' , staan 'stand' , le 'lie' and loop 'walk' are regarded as CPVs. In most typological literature on postural verbs, loop ('walk') is not regarded as a postural verb, as it rather is a dynamic activity verb. However, as indicated by Breed (2012), loop in Afrikaans has the same semantic features, lexical form and grammatical function as the grammaticalised CPV en progressive, and in this article it is therefore considered and discussed entirely as a cardinal postural construction.