Edited by Martin Hilpert, Bert Cappelle and Ilse Depraetere
This volume explores how Diachronic Construction Grammar can shed new light on changes in a central and well-researched domain of grammar, namely modality. Its main goal is to show how constructional analyses can help us address some of the long-standing questions that have informed discussions of… read more
Edited by Svetlana Vogeleer, Walter De Mulder and Ilse Depraetere
As of Volume 9 (1994/95) John Benjamins Publishing Company is the official publisher of the Belgian Journal of Linguistics, the annual publication of the Linguistic Society of Belgium. Each volume is topical and includes selected papers from the international meetings organised by the LSB. read more
In this chapter, we report on a corpus study that investigates diachronic changes in the use of 15 hedged performatives (HPs) (Fraser 1975) in British English. The time span ranges from 1710 till 2016: we use three corpora to investigate the use of HP from Late Modern English till Contemporary… read more
When an ambiguous lexical item appears within a familiar string of words, it can instantly receive an appropriate interpretation from this context, thus being saturated by it. Such a context may also short-circuit illocutionary and other pragmatic aspects of interpretation. We here extract from… read more
In this paper we aim to show how distinct semantic and pragmatic layers of modal interpretation can be fruitfully integrated within a constructionist approach. We discuss in detail a number of cases from the Simpsons where a modal verb, as part of a longer expression, has a short-circuited… read more
Several linguists have pointed out that the past tense has the implicature that the situation it refers to is no longer the case at the moment of speaking (cf. John lived in London in 1985, but he no longer does). In this article, it is argued that in certain types of sentences the implicature… read more
