Regularity in Semantic Change

Traugott, Elizabeth Closs; Dasher, Richard B.

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511486500

Cited by 684 publications

(796 citation statements)

References 306 publications

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“…In Diewald's (2006) terms, (38) and (39) are 'isolating' contexts, in which the propositional reading has become associated with the construction as a distinct reading. From the discussion above, it can be concluded that the path followed by the appropriateness adjectives basically fits the customary A > A/B > B schema proposed by Traugott & Dasher (2002), in which A is the original use, B the new use and A/B the transitional use with features of both A and B. Applied to the constructions studied here, A is the mandative to-or that-complement, B the propositional to-or that-complement, and A/B the to-or that-complement which bridges from a mandative to a propositional reading.…”

Section: Adjectives Level Form Cemet Clmet1 Clmet2 Clmet3supporting

confidence: 56%

The clausal complementation of deontic-evaluative adjectives in extraposition constructions: a synchronic-diachronic approach

linden

Davidse

2009

Flin

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This article develops a functional synchronic-diachronic description of the clausal complementation of deontic-evaluative adjectives in extraposition constructions (ECs). It does so on the basis of qualitative and quantitative corpus-based analyses of the importance adjectives important, essential, crucial and the appropriateness adjectives appropriate, proper, and fitting. All six adjectives can currently take either mandative complements expressing desired action (coded by to-infinitives or that-clauses) or propositional complements describing arguable claims (typically coded by that-clauses). In reference grammars these have tended to receive incomplete coverage without elucidation of the constructional polysemies involved. We argue that a better understanding of the present system can be arrived at by investigating the diachronic developments by which it was fashioned. The ECs with these adjectives started off as mandative constructions and this continues to be their current unmarked use. They also developed patterns with propositional complements, but in this area the importance and appropriateness adjectives followed different diachronic paths, leading to distinct pragmatico-semantic readings of the pattern with single proposition in Present-day English.

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Section: Adjectives Level Form Cemet Clmet1 Clmet2 Clmet3supporting

confidence: 56%

The clausal complementation of deontic-evaluative adjectives in extraposition constructions: a synchronic-diachronic approach

linden

Davidse

2009

Flin

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“…These have developed into a semantic contrast between 'a past event that is unknown to the addressee' (uúch) and 'a past event that is known to the addressee' (kuúch). Bergqvist (in press) details this development as an instance of "intersubjectification" (Traugott & Dasher, 2002). …”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The grammar of engagement II: typology and diachrony

2017

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a b st r a c tEngagement systems encode the relative accessibility of an entity or state of affairs to the speaker and addressee, and are thus underpinned by our social cognitive capacities. In our first foray into engagement (Part 1), we focused on specialised semantic contrasts as found in entity-level deictic systems, tailored to the primal scenario for establishing joint attention. This second paper broadens out to an exploration of engagement at the level of events and even metapropositions, and comments on how such systems may evolve. The languages Andoke and Kogi demonstrate what a canonical system of engagement with clausal scope looks like, symmetrically assigning 'knowing' and 'unknowing' values to speaker and addressee. Engagement is also found cross-cutting other epistemic categories such as evidentiality, for example where a complex assessment of relative speaker and addressee awareness concerns the source of information rather than the proposition itself. Data from the language Abui reveal that one way in which engagement systems can develop is by upscoping demonstratives, which normally denote entities, to apply at the level of events. We conclude by stressing the need for studies that focus on what difference it makes, in terms of Bien des notions en linguistique … apparaîtront sous un jour différent si on les rétablit dans le cadre du discours, qui est la langue en tant qu'assumée par l'homme qui parle, et dans la condition d'intersubjectivité, qui seule rend possible la communication linquistique.

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“…The research is usage based both in the sense that it promotes investigation of "real" language use (such as spoken and written communication and experiments of different kinds) and with reference to the nature of language (i.e., how languages are acquired, how they develop and how they change in the contexts where they are used in social communication; cf. Traugott and Dasher 2005;Tomasello 2003Tomasello , 2008). People's ways of expressing themselves are functionally motivated and spring from communicational needs in social intercourse and the settings of the symbolic structures, i.e., the form-meaning pairings.…”

Section: Basic Assumptions and Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic profiles of antonymic adjectives in discourse

et al. 2015

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This study has two goals: First, to give an account of the semantic organization of individually used antonymic adjectives in discourse and second, based on those findings and previous work on antonymic meanings, to contribute to a comprehensive theoretical account of their representation within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. The hypothesis is that the members of the pairs are used in the same contexts and in the same type of constructions, not only when they co-occur and are used to express binary opposition as shown in previous studies, but also when they do not. The manually coded corpus data from the BNC are analyzed along four semantic parameters: (i) the configuration of the adjectives in terms of gradability, (ii) the way they modify the nominal meanings, i.e., attributively or predicatively (iii) the meaning type of the modified nouns, and (iv) the status of the constructions with respect to whether their meanings are what we refer to as "basic", metaphorical or metonymical. Correspondence analysis technique is used to identify similarities and differences on the basis of the totality of the data. As predicted, our findings confirm a high degree of pairwise similarity -but also some differences. On the basis of these results, it can be argued that the long-standing controversy within Structuralism between proponents of the co-occurrence hypothesis and the substitutability hypothesis in antonym research is a non-issue.Keywords: opposition, gradability, nominal meaning, metaphor, metonymy, literal, scalar, corpus, adjectives, English, semantics, noun, attributive, figurative, syntagmatic, paradigmatic, substitution hypothesis, co-occurrence hypothesis

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Regularity in Semantic Change

Cited by 684 publications

References 306 publications

The clausal complementation of deontic-evaluative adjectives in extraposition constructions: a synchronic-diachronic approach

The clausal complementation of deontic-evaluative adjectives in extraposition constructions: a synchronic-diachronic approach

The grammar of engagement II: typology and diachrony

Semantic profiles of antonymic adjectives in discourse

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