Impersonalización, modalidad deóntica y discurso judicial: un estudio del modal δεῖ en Lisias

Impersonalization is a communicative peculiarity of courtroom discourse and the modal verb δεῖ is one of the linguistic devices that encode it in Greek. Δεῖ expresses deontic modality, which includes directive value for the expression of orders and other directive speech acts. This paper offers a study of δεῖ in Lysias’ forensic speeches.

A corpus-based study of directives in Taiwanese Southern Min

This study aims to examine the subtypes of directives and their realization patterns in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). The data were drawn from a play script corpus published in the 20th century. Nine directive subtypes were identified: advice, begging, invitation, order, offer, request, suggestion, urge, and warning. The realization patterns were analyzed in terms of the main components in the directives: alerter, discourse marker, politeness marker, subject, modal expression, verb phrase, and utterance final particle. The analysis reveals a number of features: (1) Alerters mainly take the form of an address term; (2) Utterance-initial discourse markers are mainly realized by tan ‘now’; (3) The subject is either hearer-dominated or speaker- and hearer-dominated, with the latter expressing solidarity in casual situations; (4) the politeness marker chhiáⁿ tends to take an overt subject; (5) The modal verb tio̍h accounts for the majority of subtypes; (6) The dominant verb types include dynamic, stative, uttering, and ingesting verbs; (7) Complex verb constructions mainly include directional verbs, disposal markers, and benefactive verbs; (8) Directional verbs are pervasive across all directives. A metaphorical transfer is operative in the use of directional verbs. Those marking an action toward the speaker (e.g., lâi ‘come’) are strongly associated with a positive attitude, while those expressing movement away from the speaker (e.g., khì ‘go’) are highly connected to an adversative mood. The omnipresence of [lâi V] suggests that it has been conventionalized as a default bundle to express politeness.

Bias and Modality in Conditionals: Experimental Evidence and Theoretical Implications

The concept of bias is familiar to linguists primarily from the literature on questions. Following the work of Giannakidou and Mari (Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought: Modality, Mood, and Propositional Attitudes, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2021), we assume “nonveridical equilibrium” (implying that p and ¬p as equal possibilities) to be the default for epistemic modals, questions and conditionals. The equilibrium of conditionals, as that of questions, can be manipulated to produce bias (i.e., reduced or higher speaker commitment). In this paper, we focus on three kinds of modal elements in German that create bias in conditionals and questions: the adverb wirklich ‘really’, the modal verb sollte ‘should’, and conditional connectives such as falls ‘if/in case’. We conducted two experiments collecting participants’ inference about speaker commitment in different manipulations, Experiment 1 on sollte/wirklich in ob-questions and wenn-conditionals, and Experiment 2 on sollte/wirklich in wenn/falls/V1-conditionals. Our findings are that both ob-questions and falls-conditionals express reduced speaker commitment about the modified (antecedent) proposition in comparison to wenn-conditionals, which did not differ from V1-conditionals. In addition, sollte/wirklich in the antecedent of conditionals both create negative bias about the antecedent proposition. Our studies are among the first that deal with bias in conditionals (in comparison to questions) and contribute to furthering our understanding of bias.

EXPRESSION OF INDUCEMENT IN KOREAN AND BULGARIAN

This article attempts to present some means of expressing inducement in Korean and Bulgarian and to suggest some features discovered in the translation corpus, composed of five original Korean novels and their translations in Bulgarian. Unlike imperative mood, which is a grammatically concretized notion of deontic modality, inducement is a complex unity formed by various elements such as morphological, syntactic and lexical elements. Therefore, it can be realized both directly and indirectly through the means, which express / do not express inducement in its own form. As for the direct way, Bulgarian has a synthetic and an analytic form. Korean has only a synthetic form, but it has six imperative endings, differing in terms of formality and politeness. Regarding the indirect way, some means like interrogative sentences with the verb in indicative mood and declarative sentences with modal verb are actively used in both languages, while others are used only in Bulgarian. For example, the use of a declarative sentence with a future tense verb in the indicative mood for the purpose of expressing inducement is clearly confirmed in Bulgarian, but in Korean this kind of sentence does not perform the same function at all. From the studied translation materials five main asymmetric features have been found – in the person of the addressee, the voice of the sentence, the way of expressing the inducement, the sentence structure and the way of strengthening the persistence.

Pragmatic Marker I Pray in Early Modern English

Te article deals with the sentences that contain pragmatic marker I pray you / thee and its variants as a parenthetical clause. Te linguistic material for synchronic analysis is taken from the texts of the plays written by the English authors during the 16−17th centuries. Te examination of the lexicalgrammatical and stylistic characteristics of the structures under analysis shows that the greatest variety of the marker forms is achieved at the beginning of the period under consideration. Te following processes are seen to be the sources of the diversity: the increase of expression by means of an adverb (now, still, hartyly) or a modal verb, the change of the pronunciation of the constituent words followed by modifcations of their representation in the text (comes into I prythee with variants prithee, pr’ythee), the elimination of subject and / or object (resulting in the forms pray, pray you, I pray). Towards the end of the period under consideration, in the second half of the 17th century, the diversity of the variants of the marker decreases, predominantly the following structures continue to exist: I pray, pray and I prythee. Te parenthetical clause is studied in diachrony as well. Te forms of the marker constituents, the peculiarities of the marker word order, the position of the clause in the sentences, the combination with other pragmatic markers are compared with the sentences from the texts of the 14−15th centuries.

Diachronie der Zukunft

Based on the Reference Corpus of Middle High German (REM) and the Bonn Early New High German Corpus (FnhdC), this paper investigates the development of the German future construction werden + Infinitive as well as constructions that are often seen as its predecessors and/or competitors. The paper focuses on the construction werden + Present Participle but also takes modal verb constructions with mögen, müssen, sollen, and wollen into account. A semantic analysis of the dependent verbs occurring in the constructions with regard to their aspectual characteristics reveals that werden + Infinitive and werden + Present Participle undergo parallel developments that can be seen as context expansion from a grammaticalization-theoretical perspective. The modal verb constructions, by contrast, remain stable with regard to the aspectual semantics of their dependent verbs. Furthermore, it is argued that, following recent theoretical approaches from diachronic Construction Grammar, the complex relationship between werden + Infinitive and werden + Participle can be modelled as ›attraction‹ or contamination between different constructions.

‚können‘ als kommunikative Ressource zur Markierung des Möglichkeitsraums bei Teilhabeeinschränkungen

To people with impairments, communicating their capabilities to participate in social life is a central issue. In this paper, we examine these very capabilities in the context of the use of the German modal verb können. We show that in the present data – group conversations from ‘Future Workshops’ embedded in the research project ‘Gut leben in NRW’ – the modal verb functions as a communicative resource which participants use to mark and articulate their own capabilities on a linguistic as well as interactional level, to negotiate them and to position themselves along with it. On the methodological level, concepts from two different disciplines are linked: the social science capability approach of Sen (2010) and Nussbaum (1999) and conversation analysis according to Deppermann (2008 [1999])

A comparative analysis of the expressions of giving and receiving in the tatar and japanese languages

Comparing two languages may lead to the results, which would help to understand both of the languages being under the analysis deeper, and it may be helpful to see the language from a new side. The results which are achieved by the comparative method, showing common features of the languages being compared, make the process of studying a foreign language easier. As the Tatar speaking audience does not commonly study Japanese language, studying it through the mother language may make the process of studying and acquisition less difficult. Being the representatives of agglutinative languages, the Tatar and the Japanese have common features that have to be studied by the comparative linguistics. This article deals with the constructions, which consist of verbal adverb and modal verb in Tatar and Japanese languages whose meaning is to give/to receive. Such constructions are analyzed and compared in terms of their grammatical form, semantics and considered through the lens of cultural linguistics.

Pragmatic marker i pray in middle english written monuments

The article deals with the variations of predicative pragmatic marker I pray yow / thee. The linguistic material is taken from the texts that were written in XIV-XV centuries by English authors and created in different genres (plays, ballades, visions, confessions, etc.) containing elements of dialogic speech. It has been found that the marker was not a stiff structure during the period under consideration. The variations of the expression were formed as the result of miscellaneous processes that can be seen in its following features: non-fixed composition of the marker, that can be enlarged (by an adverb here I the pray, a modal verb I wold the pray) and can be reduced (by elision of a object pronoun I preye), non-permanent word order depending on the requirement of a rhyme and preferences of the writer (I þe praye, y pray Þe, preye I thee), the representation of the expression in the sentence as both parenthetical clause and main one (followed by a that-subordinate clause). The peculiarities of the location of the marker in the sentence are discussed. If I pray yow/thee is the only one pragmatic marker in the sentence, it is placed at the beginning or at the end of it. The placement of the parenthetical expression inside the receiving sentence is characteristic of the individual style of the author and is not common. If the expression is combined with other markers, predicative and non predicative, there are two variants of their localization in the sentence: «pointwise», when several markers are concentrated at the beginning or at the end of the construction, and «framework», when phatic parts are located in ante- and postposition of the markers receiving sentence.