Las misteriosas /r/ de los adverbios en -mente del español medieval

The aim of this paper is to analyze the affix ‑m(i)entre of modal adverbs in Medieval Spanish, e.g. fuertemientre. The hypothesis is that the non-etymological, epenthetic r may be analyzed from a phonological perspective only, without grammatical or lexical explanations. The paper first reviews the three traditional explanations for the non-etymological r in modal adverbs, especially the analogical one, which poses that the r of these adverbs is an analogy from the etymological r of the temporal adverb m(i)entre. The paper shows the weakness of these traditional analyses. The paper then presents an alternative analysis on phonological basis, which has greater parsimony than traditional explanations, adding typological evidence outside the grammatical field of modal adverbs, and showing that a non-etymological r appeared in many Spanish words, and in other Romance languages, in the same phonetic and syllabic contexts as the modal affix ‑m(i)entre. Finally, the paper proposes three causes for the loss of modal ‑m(i)entre: the weakening of intra-paradigmatic support from modal ‑miente, a homonymic clash between modal ‑m(i)entre and temporal m(i)entre, and the generalization of the learned form ‑mente. The paper places the diachronic loss of the modal affix with r in a theoretical frame of multicausality.

Hedging modal adverbs in Slovenian academic discourse

This paper first presents a comparative analysis of modal adverbs in doctoral theses in the humanities and social sciences on the one hand, and in natural and technical sciences on the other from the 1.7-billion-token corpus of Slovenian academic texts KAS (Erjavec et al., 2019a). Using a randomized concordance analysis, we observe the epistemic and non-epistemic usage of the modal adverbs and show that epistemic adverbs are more characteristic of the humanities and social sciences theses. We also show that the non-epistemic dispositional meaning of possibility, which is most commonly used in natural and technical sciences theses, is not used as a hedging device. In the second part of the paper we compare the usage of a selected set of modals in bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral theses in order to chart how researchers’ approach to stance-taking changes at different proficiency levels in academic writing, showing that the observed increase in hedging devices in doctoral theses seems to be less a function of an increased proficiency level in academic writing as such and more the result of conceptual differences between undergraduate and postgraduate theses, only the latter of which are original research contributions with extensive discussion of the results.

Germination, early development, and creativity in the acquisition of the Yucatec Maya deictic system

The Yucatec Maya language has a highly complex deictic system with interesting typological differences that in addition to demonstratives and locative adverbs also includes ostensive evidentials and modal adverbs. Given that deictic words are among the first that children produce, the aim of this study is to identify the early acquisition that Yucatec Mayan children follow to map out each deictic form. Deictic words taken from spontaneous, longitudinal, transversal corpora and Gaskins's (1990) field work annotations were labeled and analyzed. The results show that children begin by uttering protoforms mapped with prototypical functions of locative and modal adverbs, but the functions of both demonstratives and ostensive evidentials are expressed mostly with the same protoform, which is similar to the deictic organizations of other languages. When children become productive, they overextend functions, which demonstrates a reanalysis of the system before acquisition is complete.

Pragmaticalisation et polysémie de la particule așa du roumain contemporain. Une perspective typologique et contrastive

"Pragmaticalization and Polysemy of the Particle așa in Contemporary Romanian Language. A Typological and Contrastive Approach. This article pursues the series of studies we have previously devoted to the pragmaticalization and discursive functioning of (spatial, temporal or modal) adverbs in contemporary Romanian language (atunci, altfel, de altfel, apoi, etc.). This time, our approach aims at outlining the discursive status of the particle așa in contemporary Romanian, in order to emphasize that this lexical item frequently acquires – by itself or in more or less fixed, lexicalized expressions – complex pragmatic and discursive values, often hard to distinguish from one another. This semantic-pragmatic behaviour (which, surprisingly, has not been extensively debated by Romanian linguists) could be explained, from our point of view, by the fact that the deictic and anaphoric core meaning of this lexical item has a much wider abstract content than the temporal or spatial adverbs we have previously analysed, as such a meaning often needs, in the communicative process, a non-verbal informative “addition” (frequently, an indicative gesture). Thus, this core meaning is the one that allows and favours the numerous discursive-pragmatic values of the analysed particle in contemporary Romanian. Keywords: Romanian particle așa, pragmaticalization, discursive and/or pragmatic markers, intradiscursive and interdiscursive analysis"

Use of Modals as Stance Markers: A Corpus-Based Study on Pakistani English Newspaper Editorials

This study analyses the use of modals as stance markers in newspaper editorials. Corpora of the study comprised of 500 editorials published in Pakistani English newspapers, that is, The Daily Dawn and The Daily News (250 editorials from each newspaper) which were analysed with the help of AntConc 3.4.4.0. Results show Pakistani editorial writers use all types of modals (i.e., prediction, possibility, necessity, modal adverbs, reporting verbs, knowledge verbs and generic phrases). The editorial writers use these modals to mark personal stance while commenting, reporting or informing about the state of affairs. Among these modals the use of prediction markers is the most frequent which indicates that prediction is a characteristic feature as well as function in the said newspaper editorials. Results also reveal that there is a difference in the use of modal adverbs in the editorials of both newspapers. In addition, the results reveal that the editorial writers of The Daily Dawn make less use of prediction markers as compared to the editorial writers of The Daily News. The study creates awareness of the stance of editorial writers’ and how it might affect readers’ opinions.

Modification of DPs by epistemic adverbs

We examine two phenomena which, with the exception of Bogal-Allbritten & Weir (2017), have not been systematically studied together but are clearly related: (a) epistemic adverbs in ad-nominal positions modifying a DP outside of coordination and (b) epistemic adverbs modifying a DP within a coordination of DPs (Collins conjunction). Ad-nominal adverbs outside of coordinate structures have been claimed to have a strong reading giving rise to an existential entailment ("John visited maybe England" entails that John visited some place, and that place might have been England) while in Collins conjunctions, a weak reading with no existential implication has been claimed to be available ("John and perhaps Mary went to the store" means that either John went to the store, or John and Mary went to the store). We provide corpus data which show that weak and strong readings are available both inside and outside coordination, and we provide a unified analysis of both phenomena based in event semantics which allows modal adverbs to have sub-sentential scope and still target expressions of propositional type. Our analysis relies on the flexible approach to semantic composition afforded by glue semantics (Dalrymple 1999; Gotham 2018), where a functor can ‘ignore’ unsaturated positions in its arguments.