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- Volume 30, Issue 2, 2023
Functions of Language - Volume 30, Issue 2, 2023
Volume 30, Issue 2, 2023
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Do ‘say’ verbs really grammaticalize into complementizers through clause combination?
Author(s): Haiping Long and Chuanlin Dengpp.: 137–158 (22)More LessAbstractWhen a ‘say’ clause is combined with a quoted-speech clause, one of two hypothetical pathways may be followed: (a) a complementation pathway on which the ‘say’ clause takes the quoted-speech clause as its complement clause and thus becomes its matrix clause; (b) a conjoining pathway which involves no syntactic operation but rather the loss of a prosodic gap between the two. Following the second pathway, ‘say’ may become grammaticalized into a quotative particle. On neither pathway is ‘say’ grammaticalized into a complementizer. It is proposed that cross-linguistically so-called ‘say’ complementizers, including the alleged Chinese complementizer shuō, are more likely to be not complementizers but rather quotative particles.
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The genre specifics of English wh-exclamatives
Author(s): Daniela Schröderpp.: 159–182 (24)More LessAbstractThis paper puts forward the hypothesis that wh-exclamatives in Present-day English are much more genre-specific than has previously been acknowledged. To test this, prototypical how- and what-exclamatives are searched for in three different corpora containing material from conceptually oral language, that is prose fiction, personal letters and informal, spontaneous face-to-face conversations. The results show that in terms of token frequency, wh-exclamatives are most frequent in personal letters, a genre which has hitherto not been linked with exclamatives. Furthermore, the outcomes demonstrate that each genre shows a different distribution of exclamatives. In all cases, the different structural realizations (clausal vs. non-clausal form) can be connected to the function the exclamative fulfills in the respective genre and to the general properties of the three distinct text types. The results compel us to consider that exclamatives might be more specialized than has been believed so far.
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Seeing and knowing
Author(s): Henrik Bergqvistpp.: 183–208 (26)More LessAbstractThe paper provides evidence against the claim that perceptual access is commonly encoded in direct evidentials. While visual, auditory, tactile and olfactory perception are conveyed by direct evidentials in contexts where such interpretations are appropriate, in others it is the speaker’s involvement, affectedness and established beliefs which are conveyed. These may be exclusive to the speaker or shared by the addressee. Instead of information source, it is argued that some direct evidentials encode the speaker’s epistemic authority regarding an event based on their primary relation to the event. Epistemic authority concerns the speaker’s rights over knowledge and is therefore a relational concept that captures some of the dynamics between speech act participants in terms of knowledge representation and attribution. Support for this argument comes from the diachronic development of direct evidentials, the effects of co-distribution between direct evidentials and person marking (egophoricity), and patterns of use. Data comes from the literature on evidentiality and frequently cited languages from Tucanoan and Quechuan languages that feature well-described, rich evidential systems.
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The function of extra negation
Author(s): Egbert Fortuinpp.: 209–237 (29)More LessAbstractThis paper provides insight into the phenomenon of extra negation, also known as non-compositional, expletive, or pleonastic negation. It provides a corpus-based analysis of the Dutch negative privative construction, which consists of zonder ‘without’ and niet ‘not’, in which one negation does not cancel the other. Two basic factors that trigger an extra negation are discussed, and an explanation of why these factors facilitate the use of an extra negation is offered. It is argued that the extra negation has a semantic-pragmatic function that is reminiscent of similar instances of extra negation in Dutch and other languages, specifically sentences consisting of a main clause and a subordinate clause containing a word which expresses implicit negation. It is shown that in complex hypotactic constructions, the extra negation is used to make explicit in the subordinate clause that the presupposition of non-occurrence is rejected.
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Review of Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022): Modelling paralanguage using systemic functional semiotics: Theory and application
Author(s): Zhigang Yupp.: 238–243 (6)More LessThis article reviews Modelling paralanguage using systemic functional semiotics: Theory and application
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Review of Huang (2022): Toward multimodal pragmatics: A Study of illocutionary force in Chinese situated discourse
Author(s): Yanhua Chengpp.: 244–248 (5)More LessThis article reviews Toward multimodal pragmatics: A Study of illocutionary force in Chinese situated discourse
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Review of Yang (2022): Non-finiteness: A process-relation perspective
Author(s): Akila Sellami Bakloutipp.: 249–254 (6)More LessThis article reviews Non-finiteness: A process-relation perspective
Volumes & issues
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Volume 31 (2024)
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Volume 30 (2023)
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Volume 29 (2022)
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Volume 28 (2021)
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Volume 27 (2020)
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Volume 26 (2019)
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Volume 25 (2018)
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Volume 24 (2017)
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Volume 23 (2016)
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Volume 22 (2015)
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Volume 21 (2014)
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Volume 20 (2013)
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Volume 19 (2012)
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Volume 18 (2011)
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Volume 17 (2010)
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Volume 16 (2009)
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Volume 15 (2008)
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Volume 14 (2007)
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Volume 13 (2006)
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Volume 12 (2005)
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Volume 11 (2004)
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Volume 10 (2003)
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Volume 9 (2002)
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Volume 8 (2001)
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Volume 7 (2000)
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Volume 6 (1999)
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Volume 5 (1998)
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Volume 4 (1997)
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Volume 3 (1996)
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Volume 2 (1995)
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Volume 1 (1994)
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Language patterns and ATTITUDE
Author(s): Monika Bednarek
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