Volume 53, Issue 6 -

This paper studies, on the basis of corpus data, the licensing and blocking factors in the lexical-constructional integration process of causative frighten verbs into a number of constructions. This study is particularly compatible with the central postulates of Goldberg’s (1995, 2006) Cognitive Construction Grammar . Thus, the analysis is carried out on the basis of construction-specific and more general constraints spelled out in order to avoid the mismatch between coercing and coerced constructional elements. We devote our attention to constraints involving conceptual compatibility between lexical items and constructional configurations, and to the metonymic and metaphoric activity which underlies such compatibility. We also explore the pragmatic and discourse-functional features which influence acceptability in constructional environments. In addition, two families of constructions are identified and discussed as separate from other constructions: the fake intransitive and the cause subject constructions. We offer a fine-grained analysis of both constructional families and of each of the members that each accommodates.

This paper explores the construal of temporality in personal narratives written in English, Spanish, and Hebrew, three languages that differ in their morphological marking of tense-aspect. Participants were native speakers of each language in four different age groups from middle childhood across adolescence into adulthood, so taking into account developmental facets of narrative temporality in each language. Focus is on distribution of situations on and off the timeline of the story from the point of view of the linguistic configurations employed by narrators to express the temporal domains of tense and aspect in the three languages at both the intra-clausal and inter-clausal levels. Hebrew was found to differ from Spanish and English, both of which have more enriched system of grammaticized aspect, in the distribution of situations on and off the timeline both developmentally across age groups and in the linguistic means conflated in expression of temporality. The more impoverished system of grammatical aspect in Hebrew led narrators writing in Hebrew to prefer a more linear temporal organization than their counterparts in Spanish and English. The study distinguishes between shared versus language-particular patterns of narrative-embedded temporality from the point of view of linguistic forms and their temporal functions in the context of extended discourse. Results of the study shed light on the interrelations between local linguistic means and the discourse-embedded expression of temporality in narrative development.

A lack of consensus has existed regarding the interaction of English modals with categories such as tense, and individual modal forms can vary in the extent to which they make assertions regarding temporal reference. The present work attempts to provide a compositional semantic account of English modals by proposing that these forms may be inflected both for tense and for mood. The crosslinguistic status of inflectional moods such as the subjunctive is examined; it is argued that an inflectional subjunctive exists in Modern English with semantic properties similar to those of comparable forms in older Indo-European languages, and the extent to which linguistic cues would permit learners of English to acquire such a category is discussed. Data on English modals are reviewed in light of the analysis proposed here to determine its compatibility with observed usage. It is suggested that the analysis proposed here has certain advantages over models in which the observed semantic range of English modals is presented in terms of an unprincipled heterogeneity.

This study examines the modal adverbs in English including doubtless , indeed , no doubt , and of course from a functional perspective. Although an increasing number of studies have investigated “core” modal adverbs (e.g., certainly , possibly , probably ), a comprehensive analysis including these four modal adverbs has not been offered in modal adverb studies. The present study begins to address this research gap by providing descriptions of these adverbs using data from the LOB (1961) and FLOB (1991) corpora. To adopt a more comprehensive view of the set of modal adverbs, I compare the behaviors of the modal adverbs without -ly to those with -ly in terms of their discourse and interpersonal functions in the text, and present the relationship between form and function of the modal adverbs. The results of the analysis demonstrate that the modal adverbs that convey the same degree of probability fulfill different functions at the discourse-pragmatic level. Moreover, the modal adverbs without - ly have increased their pragmatic functions over time, thus signaling a short-term diachronic development. Finally, I provide an explanation of this change in terms of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization.

In this article I focus on the verbs used to introduce Direct Speech in a corpus of fictional narratives in English and their Spanish translations in order to compare the way these two languages reconstruct speech events in texts by means of verbs of communication (e.g., say/decir , counter/argumentar , declare/manifestar ) and other non-speech patterns (e.g., grin/sonreir , scowl/fruncir el ceño ). Drawing upon typological research on motion (Talmy 1985, 1988, 1991; Slobin 1996a, 1996b, 2004, 2005, 2006), I address the following questions: (a) How do English and Spanish recreate a speech event by means of the verbs used to introduce Direct Speech?, (b) What does this say about these languages typologically-wise? and (c) Is it congruent with descriptions of Spanish and English as typological opposites in the literature? The hypothesis is that the differences between these two languages do not rest upon lexical availability, but on the weight placed in different speech elements in agreement with two different agendas regarding speech events. While congruent with typological studies, this piece of research attempts to broaden their scope and explore a topic still underexplored.