In:Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts: In honor of Merja Kytö
Edited by Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 97] 2020
► pp. 247–264
Chapter 15
Sort of and kind of from an English-Swedish perspective
Published online: 5 October 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.97.15aij
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.97.15aij
The aim of this study has been to contribute to the discussion of type nouns by investigating the different meanings and functions of sort of and kind of from an English-Swedish contrastive perspective on the basis of their correspondences (translations or sources) in the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. The results can confirm analyses of the functions of sort of and kind of which have been suggested in earlier work and point to cases where sort/kind of are ambivalent between different functions. The contrastive analysis gives support for both conventional and less conventional or semi-conventionalised meanings, implicatures, pragmatic effects and semantic (negative) connotations associated with the type noun.
Keywords: type noun, parallel corpus,
sort/kind of
, meaning potential
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Description of the data
- 3.Syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of sort of and kind of
- 3.1Type nouns with a classifying use
- 3.2Type nouns with a characterising use
- 3.3The quantifier construction
- 3.4Type nouns with an identifying use
- 3.5Type nouns with an approximating function
- 3.6Adverbial or discourse marker uses
- 4.Conclusion
Notes References
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