Refine
Has Fulltext
- no (2) (remove)
Year of publication
- 2020 (2) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (1)
- Habilitation Thesis (1)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (2)
Keywords
- Cognitive Construction Grammar (1)
- Spanish (1)
- expression of probability (1)
- mood (1)
- qualitative analysis (1)
Institute
This book is concerned with the diachronic development of selected topic and focus markers in Spanish, Portuguese and French. On the one hand, it focuses on the development of these structures from their relational meaning to their topic-/ focus-marking meaning, and on the other hand, it is concerned with their current form und use. Thus, Romance topic and focus markers – such as sp. en cuanto a, pt. a propósito de, fr. au niveau de or sentence-initial sp. Lo que as well as clefts and pseudo-clefts – are investigated from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The author argues that topic markers have procedural meaning and that their function is bound to their syntactic position. An important contribution of this study is the fact that real linguistic evidence (in the form of data from various corpora) is analyzed instead of operating with constructed examples.
This paper is concerned with constructions that express probability and their interaction with the indicative and subjunctive mood, as well as with other contextual elements. In detail, the paper deals with the constructions [sin duda + indicative/subjunctive], [tal vez + indicative/subjunctive], [probablemente + indicative/subjunctive] and [posiblemente + indicative/subjunctive]. In their interaction with mood, the constructions are understood as different microconstructions. For example, [sin duda + indicative] and [sin duda + subjunctive] are seen as different microconstructions of the superordinate
mesoconstruction [modal construction (of probability) + verb]. In a qualitative analysis examples from the CREA, CORPES XXI, and CdE corpora are examined regarding the interaction of [expression of probability] + [mood]. Following the Principle of No Synonymy of Grammatical Forms, the analysis confirms that the use of mood additionally influences the expressed degree of probability of the constructions. For instance, while probablemente generally expresses a slightly higher probability than posiblemente, a fine-tuned analysis
shows that the expressed degrees of probability of [probablemente + subjunctive] and [posiblemente + indicative] are highly similar. This is also often confirmed by further contextual information. In summary, the paper shows that Cognitive Construction Grammar is
a very suitable background against which to investigate modal phenomena, as cognitive approaches generally deal with the ways in which language users conceptualize the world from their own point of view, and as expressions of modality, more precisely, probability,
are also closely related to speakers’ attitudes or perspectives.