Article published In: Linguistics in the Netherlands 2014
Edited by Anita Auer and Björn Köhnlein
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 31] 2014
► pp. 66–77
As well as I can / As I best can / As best as I can — Some properties of potentiality equatives
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
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Published online: 10 November 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.31.06hoe
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.31.06hoe
This article discusses a special type of equative comparison constructions: Potentiality equatives, i.e. equatives with a standard clause containing a predicate of physical or cognitive ability, or epistemic possibility. The focus in this article is on potentiality equatives involving a (negative) comparative or a superlative in the standard clause, as these seem to give a particularly clear insight into the properties of this construction type. It is argued that the broad syntactic variation in potentiality equatives is caused by their specific semantics, by their expressive force and by their idiomatic nature.
Keywords: expressive force, entailment, idioms, equative, Comparison, potentiality
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