Modal particles and the common ground

Karagjosova, Elena

doi:10.1075/pbns.114.19kar

Cited by 31 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…While a limited set of modal particles appear to independently epistemically affect statements (see Tables 3-4), we will not spend much time discussing these, as they appear to be a relatively minor way of expressing epistemic modality (Nuyts, 2000), and are generally more involved in marking the epistemic states of discourse participants, or expressing discourse attitudes (c.f. Bross, 2012;Gutzmann, 2009;Hogeweg, Ramachers, & Wottrich, 2011;Karagjosova, 2004;Zimmermann, 2019).…”

Section: P R E -P U B L I C a T I O N D R A F Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not when but if: Modality and future time reference in English, Dutch and German

Robertson¹,

Roberts²

2020

Preprint

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Recently, economists have used notions of linguistic relativity to suggest that grammatical constraints on Future Time Reference (FTR) affect whether people choose to take a small reward now or wait until later for a larger reward ("temporal discounting"). Economists hypothesize that habitual use of present tense constructions for FTR may cause speakers to perceive future rewards as temporally closer, and thereby as more valuable. This approach assumes that future tenses primarily encode when an event happens, which overlooks their widespread tendency to encode modal notions of probability. It additionally overlooks the importance of modal expressions in FTR. Since people discount value as a function of both temporal distance and the probability of a reward being received, it is important to understand what different FTR tenses actually encode, as well as cross-linguistic differences in the grammaticization of modality. We therefore modified the EUROTYP questionnaire to elicit future tense as well as modal FTR constructions across a range of temporal distances and probabilities for speakers of English, Dutch, and German. We find that in English tense and probability are more strictly grammaticized than in Dutch or German, and that increasing temporal distance from speaker "now" tended to cause English and German – but not Dutch – speakers to use more uncertain terms. These results highlight the importance of modality for typological linguists working on FTR, and suggest economists working on linguistic relativity and psychological discounting should consider cross-linguistic differences in the grammaticization of modality and in the modal semantics of future tenses.

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Section: P R E -P U B L I C a T I O N D R A F Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not when but if: Modality and future time reference in English, Dutch and German

Robertson¹,

Roberts²

2020

Preprint

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“…Should they then be analyzed as presuppositional (with e.g. Kaufmann n.d.; Karagjosova 2004a,b) or as conventionally implicated (with e.g. Gutzmann 2008), or as speech act modifiers (as is done in an established tradition in the analysis of German particles exemplified by Jacobs 1991, though I must omit details for reasons of space).…”

Section: What Kind Of Meanings?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Formal Approaches to Particle Meaning

McCready

2012

Language and Linguist. Compass

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“…e.g. Brinton 1996, König 1997, Karagjosova 2003, Lenker 2010, discourse markers in English usually come from the class of adverb (e.g., well, ok, right) but they may also have a parenthetical-clausal shape (e.g., I think, you know).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The coding of discourse relations in English and German argumentative discourse

Speyer¹,

Fetzer

2014

Pragmatics &Amp; Beyond New Series

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This paper examines the overt and non-overt coding of discourse relations in the argumentative discourse genre of editorial based on a contrastive study of British English and German editorials. Particular attention is given to the linguistic coding of discourse relations positioned adjacently and non-adjacently, and to the question of granularity. The analysis of the German editorials is based on the syntactic unit of sentence, while their British counterpart is based on the syntactic unit of clause. In the data at hand, the two languages code the discourse relation of Contrast overtly in adjacent and non-adjacent positioning but employ different strategies as regards the overt coding of the coordinating discourse relation of Continuation and the subordinating discourse relations of Elaboration, Explanation and Comment. The rate of overt marking for adjacently positioned coordinating relations is higher in the German data. In the British data, there is hardly any difference between the overt marking of adjacently positioned discourse relations holding between clauses and sentences. The overt marking of subordinating discourse relations is lower in the German data, and in the British data, there is a clear preference for coding adjacently positioned subordinating discourse relations in an overt manner on the level of clause. In the experimental discourse-comprehension tasks the German subjects show a slight tendency to code discourse relations overtly if they are non-adjacent, while the British subjects prefer to code discourse relations overtly on the level of clause in both adjacent and non-adjacent positioning.

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Modal particles and the common ground

Cited by 31 publications

References 0 publications

Not when but if: Modality and future time reference in English, Dutch and German

Not when but if: Modality and future time reference in English, Dutch and German

Formal Approaches to Particle Meaning

The coding of discourse relations in English and German argumentative discourse

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