Epistemic <i>prometer</i> and Full Deontic Modal Verbs

Vázquez-Laslop, María Eugenia

doi:10.1075/bjl.14.13vaz

Cited by 2 publications

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References 3 publications

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“…The few detailed analyses of Spanish prometer and amenazar (cf. Hernanz 1999;Vázquez Laslop 2001) briefl y refer to the control and raising structures with these verbs. These authors rely on Ruwet's (1972Ruwet's ( , 1991 generative studies of subject-to-subject raising in French.…”

Section: On Raising Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Paradigmatic View of Spanish amenazar ‘to threaten’ and prometer ‘to promise’

Cornillie¹

2006

Folia Linguistica

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Besides their common lexical reading, the Spanish verbs amenazar 'threaten' and prometer 'promise' can also yield a modal reading. The shift from the former reading to the latter implies a change from a control structure to a raising structure and involves grammaticalization, more specifi cally auxiliation, which ends up in a layered co-existence of the two (or more) constructions. This paper is mainly concerned with the syntactic and semantic categorization of the grammaticalized quasi-modals amenazar and prometer. Generative accounts have focused on the difference between raising and control, but have not addressed the differences between the two verbs. This paper highlights that modal amenazar faces less constraints than modal prometer. Furthermore, the account presented below will show that epistemic and evidential auxiliaries have scope over the qualifi cation expressed by modal amenazar and prometer, and are therefore not to be called "epistemic". The paper also deals with the tense restrictions that these verbs undergo. Tenses such as the present perfect are not available in modal constructions with amenazar and prometer because of the activation of agentive patterns inherent to the lexical semantics of the verbs in question. The tense criterion is valid for verbs for which the grammaticalized form is not the most frequent one, but it does not account for true modals in Spanish and other Romance languages. The infi nitive criterion turns out to be a good alternative.

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Section: On Raising Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Paradigmatic View of Spanish amenazar ‘to threaten’ and prometer ‘to promise’

Cornillie¹

2006

Folia Linguistica

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The shift from lexical to subjective readings of Spanish prometer ‘to promise’ and amenazar ‘to threaten’. a corpus-based account

Cornillie¹

2022

PRAG

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The Spanish verbs amenazar ‘to threaten’ andprometer ‘to promise’ do not only have a lexical reading but can also yield a subjective one, whereby the likelihood of the event expressed in the infinitive receives a negative, resp. a positive, evaluation. Three hypotheses are being tested: 1) as an outcome of the illocutionary force and the subject commitment attached to lexical prometer, the subjective readings of the latter may be expected to score high on the probability scale, whereas the event introduced by subjective amenazar will score low, in line with the lack of illocutionary force and weak subject commitment in lexical reading of this verb. 2) The viewpoint substantiated by the two verbs also differs: Whereas amenazar renders an event-oriented evidential reading from an internal point of view, prometer projects an external viewpoint leading to a more speaker-oriented subjective reading. 3) As a result of (1) and (2), prometer should easily combine with negatively oriented complements, whereas amenazar should resist taking positively oriented ones. The corpus research fully corroborates the first two hypotheses. The data, however, fail to unequivocally sustain the third one, especially because amenazar displays more flexibility than expected.

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Epistemic prometer and Full Deontic Modal Verbs

Cited by 2 publications

References 3 publications

A Paradigmatic View of Spanish amenazar ‘to threaten’ and prometer ‘to promise’

A Paradigmatic View of Spanish amenazar ‘to threaten’ and prometer ‘to promise’

The shift from lexical to subjective readings of Spanish prometer ‘to promise’ and amenazar ‘to threaten’. a corpus-based account

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