Edited by Peter Lauwers, Gudrun Vanderbauwhede and Stijn Verleyen
This volume brings together five papers offering cross-linguistic analyses of pragmatic markers involving modality, supplemented by three book reviews on the same topic. The contrastive method, based on monolingual or translation corpora, does not only provide interesting insights about differences… read more
In this paper, we intend to show that grammaticalization can effectively be used as a parameter in language comparison by proposing a corpus-based account of the difference in distribution between demonstratives and definite articles in French and Dutch. Taking cases of literal but non-equivalent… read more
This paper traces the gradual abandonment of a functionalist perspective in labovian sociolinguistics. In an introductory point, the influence of French functionalism on William Labov, via Uriel Weinreich, is discussed. In the central part of the paper, Labov’s changing attitude towards… read more