Studies in Language Companion Series - Böcker

This volume consists of corpus-based analyses of progressive aspect constructions in Germanic and Romance. By adopting a variety of methodologies and theoretical frameworks, these studies provide valuable insights into the development, grammaticalization and use of various progressive structures across two subgroups of the Indo-European family. The progressive constructions under scrutiny range from widely studied and seemingly well understood constructions to relatively infrequent and obscure ones. Most chapters investigate a specific function of a particular progressive structure, or a change affecting it. Some chapters cast new light on the pragmatic, non-aspectual functions fulfilled by the progressive. All the chapters present a substantial amount of new empirical work. This collection thus provides a unique opportunity for linguists working on Romance languages to get an instant insight into similar phenomena in Germanic languages and vice versa. At the same time, the volume addresses contemporary theoretical and methodological issues in corpus, contact and historical linguistics, showing that research on the progressive remains today as relevant and inspiring as ever.

Researchers in the fields of logic, philosophy and linguistics have for many years been pondering over the elusive nature of modality and grappled with ways of capturing it. This book provides a broad overview of issues relevant to the study of modality and reflects the diversity of theoretical frameworks and the heterogeneity of linguistic phenomena included under the general heading of modality, a concept which, in one of its most frequent definitions, corresponds to the fields of possibility and necessity. The key concepts dealt with are the structure of the semantic notion of modality and of modal subcategories, force dynamics, evidentiality, mirativity, modal auxiliaries and verbs, modal uses of verbs and constructions (hedged performatives, capacitive structures, conditional constructions) and modal polyfunctionality across languages. Articles deal with observations taken from a variety of languages, including Danish, English, French, Italian, Latin and Slovak. The wealth of data and the critical evaluation of existing analyses of modality will be of interest for researchers and graduate students alike.