A Middle English Syntax

Mustanoja, Tauno F.

doi:10.1075/z.207

Cited by 48 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…Approximators "serve to express an approximation," as in ich bin fast sicher 'I am almost certain'; compromisers "have only a slight lowering effect," as in es ist ziemlich warm 'it is quite warm'; diminishers "scale downwards and roughly mean 'to a small extent'," as in das Buch war etwas interessant 'the book was somewhat interesting', and minimizers are "negative maximizers" with the almost equivalence of "(not) to any extent'," as in er ist kaum zufrieden 'he is hardly pleased'. 6 In work on English intensifiers, amplifiers were found to be more frequent than downtoners, and boosters were found to be more frequent than maximizers (Mustanoja 1960:316, Peters 1994:271, D'Arcy 2015.…”

Section: Describing German Intensifiersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adjective Intensifiers in German

Stratton

2020

J Ger Ling

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While the study of English intensifiers has been a topic of much empirical discussion (Bolinger 1972, Paradis 1997, Ito & Tagliamonte 2003, Xiao & Tao 2007, Fuchs 2017), intensification in the German language is underexplored. The present study operationalizes variationist methods to comprehensively examine the syntactic intensification of adjectives in German by investigating how adjective intensifiers rank empirically in terms of frequency and whether their use is sensitive to the social factors gender and age. Results indicate that in German, amplifiers are more frequent than downtoners, boosters are more frequent than maximizers, and the gender and the age of the speaker are factors that influence their use. These findings corroborate crosslinguistic findings (Peters 1994, Broekhuis 2013, D’Arcy 2015, Fuchs 2017). Broadly speaking, the present study suggests that the syntactic intensification of adjectives in German is, in many ways, similar to what has been observed previously in other Germanic languages.*

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Section: Describing German Intensifiersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adjective Intensifiers in German

Stratton

2020

J Ger Ling

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“…The accepted view on the emergence of the to-dative, laid out in publications such as Visser (1963), Mustanoja (1960), Allen (1995), andMcFadden (2002), is that the construction emerged in (early) Middle English as an alternative to (the overtly case-marked predecessors of) the DOC, and that this process was causally related to deflexion and to the fixation of word order in the DOC, i.e. as well as explicitly marking the function of the Recipient argument, the to-dative provided a new opportunity for the clause-final realization of the Recipient, which had become increasingly difficult in the DOC.…”

Section: The Emergence Of the To-dative And Of The English Dative Altmentioning

confidence: 99%

5. The emergence of the dative alternation in Dutch: towards the establishment of a horizontal link

Colleman¹

2020

The Diachrony of Ditransitives

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Present-day Dutch displays a productive argument structure alternation between a double object construction with bare NP Theme and Recipient object and a prepositional-dative in which the Recipient is marked by the preposition aan. The latter construction is the younger of the two: it is a post-Middle Dutch innovation, which became a well-established part of the grammar of Dutch in 17 th century language only. The present paper investigates the emergence of an embryonic dative alternation in the immediately preceding period, through a detailed investigation of the presence of aan-datives in three non-belletristic texts from the latter half of the 16 th century. It will be argued that the degree of semantic overlap between the DOC and the "new" aan-pattern increased through the combined effect of chains of local extensions in various sub-regions of "dative" semantic space.

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“…Drawing on previous proposals by Mustanoja (1960) and Fleischman (1990) (see Section 3.3), the narrative use of the present perfect in these and similar cases will be considered to have an emphatic function (see Section 3.3). In FDG Emphasis is seen as the result of the Speaker's intensification of different layers at the Interpersonal Level, that is, an Emphatic operator can be assigned at different layers within the Interpersonal Level: the Illocution, the Discourse Act, Ascriptive Subacts or Referential Subacts.…”

Section: The Narrative Present Perfect At the Interpersonal Levelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tense Switching in English Narratives: an FDG Perspective

Muñoz

2018

Open Linguistics

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The functions of the simple past and the present perfect appear to be well delimited in English according to prescriptive grammars. However, in actual use their distribution is still a challenging area of English linguistics since there are fuzzy cases in which this distinction is blurred. For example, in some varieties of English the present perfect seems to be taking over the role of the simple past to express definite past in narratives, where the simple past is the default tense. In these cases, the use of the present perfect has been regarded to be functionally motivated by the speaker’s intention to highlight the current relevance of the event expressed by this form (Ritz, 2010, Walker, 2011). The main objective of this research will be to use the results of corpus analysis and of the relevant studies on this topic and to propose an FDG analysis of these data. It will be concluded that the use of the present perfect in narratives has various functions captured at two different levels of the architecture of FDG, namely the Representational Level (RL) and the Interpersonal Level (IL). At the RL, the present perfect functions either as a marker of resultative aspect, or as a signal that a new narrative Episode is introduced. At IL, this form functions as a device for Emphasis, highlighting a salient passage in the narrative.

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A Middle English Syntax

Cited by 48 publications

References 61 publications

Adjective Intensifiers in German

Adjective Intensifiers in German

5. The emergence of the dative alternation in Dutch: towards the establishment of a horizontal link

Tense Switching in English Narratives: an FDG Perspective

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