Anja Hennemann – författare

This study adopts a context-sensitive and functional approach to the qualitative analysis of Spanish linguistic means that are used to convey evidential meanings. Verbs of cognitive attitude, modal adverbs, modal verbs, the Spanish conditional and the synthetic future are analysed against the background of pragmatics. GlossaNet, a search engine that supports the researcher to build a corpus, was used to collect the examples analysed in this study. Furthermore, as evidentiality is – at least in Spanish – a linguistic category that overlaps with other semantic-functional categories, namely epistemic modality, deixis, subjectivity and polyphony, it is argued that the superordinate category speaker’s perspectivisation should be imposed on these categories.

This book is concerned with the diachronic development of selected topic and focus markers in Spanish, Portuguese and French. On the one hand, it focuses on the development of these structures from their relational meaning to their topic-/ focus-marking meaning, and on the other hand, it is concerned with their current form und use. Thus, Romance topic and focus markers – such as sp. en cuanto a, pt. a propósito de, fr. au niveau de or sentence-initial sp. Lo que as well as clefts and pseudo-clefts – are investigated from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The author argues that topic markers have procedural meaning and that their function is bound to their syntactic position. An important contribution of this study is the fact that real linguistic evidence (in the form of data from various corpora) is analyzed instead of operating with constructed examples.

Die Konstruktionsgrammatik gehört als theoretisches Paradigma mittlerweile auch in der Romanistik zum "state of the art". Doch stellt die Beschreibung vieler sprachlicher Phänomene auch die Konstruktionsgrammatik in der Praxis immer wieder vor Probleme. Vor allem die Umfelder des Sprechens geraten dabei in den Fokus. Dies gilt einerseits für die Berücksichtigung des Kontextes sprachlicher Ausdrücke in Theorie und Praxis. Andererseits stellt die Beschreibung kommunikativer Gattungen (oder "speech genres") im Sinne von Konstruktionen die Theorie vor neue Herausforderungen. Die Beiträge dieses Sammelbandes widmen sich diesen Themen aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven und bieten Fallstudien zu zahlreichen interessanten Sprachphänomenen der romanischen Sprachen sowie des Englischen.Construction Grammar has now become an established theoretical paradigm within Romance linguistics, forming part of the current "state of the art." Nevertheless, the description of linguistic phenomena frequently presents challenges for its practical application. Above all, the contexts of speech come into focus in this regard. This applies, on the one hand, to the consideration of the usage contexts of linguistic expressions in both theory and practice. On the other hand, the description of communicative genres (or "speech genres") in terms of constructions introduces the theory to a set of new challenges. The contributions to this volume address these topics from various perspectives and provide case studies on numerous interesting language phenomena in Romance languages as well as in English.