Modality in Spanish Sign Language (LSE) revisited: a functional account

This paper provides an analysis of modality in Spanish Sign Language (Lengua de Signos Española: LSE) from a functional perspective. Following FDG assumptions, scope will be the basic criterion in delineating modal subtypes. Four representational layers are taken into account: Propositional Content, Episode, State-of-Affairs, and Configurational Property. This study highlights that LSE offers an extensive sample of manual items (with a variable degree of grammaticalization) that enable the efficient expression of a wide range of modal contents: epistemic, deontic, volitive, and facultative. LSE is thus fully congruent with oral languages (OLs) in this domain.

The Perfect in (Brazilian) Portuguese: A Functional Discourse Grammar View

In most Germanic and Romance languages the present perfect has developed from a resultative meaning via an anterior into absolute past. In Functional Discourse Grammar terms this corresponds to the grammaticalization of a phasal aspectual operator at the layer of the Configurational Property, via a relative tense operator at the layer of the State-of-Affairs, into an absolute tense operator at the layer of the Episode. This is what happened in Romance languages, such as French and Italian, while Peninsular Spanish is developing in the same direction, without as yet having fully reached the absolute past stage. The Portuguese present perfect, however, is different as it does not express resultative aspect, relative past or absolute past meaning but rather the iteration or continuity of an event from some past moment onward until after the moment of speaking. A further idiosyncrasy of the perfect in Portuguese is that the auxiliary is based on Latin tenere rather than habere, as is the case in the other Romance languages. This paper describes the semantic and the morphosyntactic aspects of the grammaticalization of the (Brazilian) Portuguese perfect in diachrony and synchrony. It turns out that (i) the medieval habere-based Portuguese present perfect becomes obsolete and the past perfect develops into a relative past, (ii) the post-medieval tenere-based past perfect turns into a relative past as well, whereas (iii) the tenere-based present perfect undergoes semantic specialization in the course of the 20th century. This paper shows how these facts can be accounted for within the Functional Discourse Grammar approach to the grammaticalization of aspect and tense.

A Family of Unitals in the Hughes Plane

We construct a family of unitals in the Hughes plane. We prove that they are not isomorphic with the classical unitals, and in so doing we exhibit a configuration that exists in the latter, but not in the former. This new configurational property of the classical unitals might serve in the future again as an isomorphism test.A particular instance of our construction has appeared in [11]. But it only concerns itself with the case where the matrix involved is the identity, whereas the present article treats the general case of symmetric matrices over a suitable field. Furthermore, [11] does not answer the isomorphism question. It states that (the English translation is ours) “It remains to be seen whether the unitary designs constructed in this note are isomorphic or not with known designs”.