Edited by Dalila Ayoun, Agnès Celle and Laure Lansari
After an introductory chapter that provides an overview to theoretical issues in tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality, this volume presents a variety of original contributions that are firmly empirically-grounded based on elicited or corpus data, while adopting different theoretical frameworks. read more
Among emotions, surprise has been extensively studied in psychology. In linguistics, surprise, like other emotions, has mainly been studied through the syntactic patterns involving surprise lexemes. However, little has been done so far to correlate the reaction of surprise investigated in… read more
This paper focuses on the construction gonna be Ving in the iWeb corpus, a very recent web-based corpus of more than 14 billion words. Our analysis shows that gonna be Ving is relatively rare but exhibits specific distributional patterns different from gonna V, notably a less frequent… read more
Verbal reactions to surprising situations or surprising information often include interrogative structures rather than exclamatives, contrary to what is assumed in traditional grammars. In such contexts, interrogatives combine requests for information and the expression of surprise (possibly… read more
This paper is an introduction to this special issue on the description and expression of surprise. In line with the ANR-funded project it is part of, this volume aims to bridge the gap between emotion, cognition and linguistics. It stresses the unique status of surprise among emotions, uncovering… read more
This paper re-examines the well-established distinction between expression and description of emotion as regards surprise. First, the authors show that the expression of surprise does not involve the use of surprise lexemes, but rather mirative utterances and specific syntactic constructions (while… read more
This paper investigates two emerging discourse markers based on verbs of saying in English and French – I was going to say and j’allais dire. Relying on various comparable corpora, the author shows that the markers under scrutiny have developed a similar use as “reduced parenthetical clauses”… read more
This paper is an introduction to this special issue on the description and expression of surprise. In line with the ANR-funded project it is part of, this volume aims to bridge the gap between emotion, cognition and linguistics. It stresses the unique status of surprise among emotions, uncovering… read more
The present contrastive English-French case study examines interactions in which an unexpected factor triggers a verbal reaction of surprise, hence affecting a speaker’s level of certainty. We focus on why-would questions in English and their equivalents in French and analyse them from a pragmatic… read more
This paper examines the use of the future periphrases be going to and aller + infinitive in conditional clauses introduced by if and si. Both monolingual and translated data is investigated. It shows that there is no equivalence between the two periphrases in such a constrained syntactic… read more
This paper aims at reexamining the notion of commitment through a case study: the comparison of the periphrases be going to and aller + inf. in contemporary English and French in a variety of texts and syntactic environments. Three cases are examined: the occurrence of the two periphrases in… read more
