Evidential adverbials in Lithuanian: a corpus-based study

Ruskan, Anna

doi:10.15388/klbt.2015.8945

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Its adverbial status and evidential epistemic meaning overlap have been discussed in fiction and academic discourse (Ruskan 2012(Ruskan , 2013. Despite the fact that there are a number of studies dealing with the functions and syntactic status of adjective-based CTPs in Lithuanian (Usonienė 2012(Usonienė , 2013(Usonienė , 2015Ruskan 2012Ruskan , 2013Ruskan , 2015, none of the studies have addressed the distribution and functions of tikėtina 'believable, likely' in present-day Lithuanian.…”

Section: The Category Of Epistemicity and Previous Accounts Of Likelymentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic qualifications of the English marker likely and its equivalents in Lithuanian

Ruskan¹

2017

KLB

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The current study focuses on the epistemic qualifications realised by the English adjective and adverb likely and its equivalents in Lithuanian panašu 'likely, it seems' and tikėtina 'believable, likely', which derive from the semantic domain of comparison and belief. The aim of the study is to identify the functional similarities and differences of the markers in terms of their frequency, syntactic features (Complement-Taking-Predicates (CTPs), adverbials), functions, collocational profile and type of discourse (academic, newspaper). The English and Lithuanian data were drawn from the monolingual corpora, namely the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language (CCLL), Corpus of Academic Lithuanian (CorALit) and the bidirectional parallel corpus ParaCorp ENàLTàEN . The quantitative and qualitative findings reveal that the closest cross-linguistic CTP and adverbial equivalents are likely and tikėtina 'believable, likely' because they are most frequent in formal registers (academic, newspaper discourse) and display similar collocational profiles and contexts of use. In contexts with explicit evidence and argumentation, they may acquire evidential functions. Although the CTP and adverbial panašu 'likely, it seems' shares similarities with likely and tikėtina 'believable, likely' in expressing the author's degree of probability, it shows a different semantic profile from the latter due to its conceptual link with the original meaning of similarity and appearances. The study shows how markers that derive from the semantic domain of comparison vary in functional distribution in present-day English and Lithuanian and introduces their functional equivalents deriving from a different semantic domain.

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Section: The Category Of Epistemicity and Previous Accounts Of Likelymentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic qualifications of the English marker likely and its equivalents in Lithuanian

Ruskan¹

2017

KLB

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“…The abundant literature on evidentiality that surged after pioneering references such as Chafe and Nichols (1986) or Willett (1988) has mostly concentrated on grammatical markers of evidentiality (Aikhenvald 2004, among many others) and certain types of words or expressions such as adverbs and lexical verbs of perception or cognition (Celle 2009;Hennemann 2012;Ruskan 2015;Usonienė & Šinkūnienė 2013;Wiemer & Socka forthcoming). By contrast, this paper explores evidential expressions containing nouns, which have received comparably scant attention.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Noun Phrases as expressions of evidentiality: an analysis of four English abstract nouns and their Spanish equivalents

Carretero¹

2017

KLB

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This paper presents an analysis of the expression of evidentiality with the English nouns evidence, indication, proof and sign and their Spanish equivalents evidencia, indicación, prueba and señal. The nouns are described as shell nouns having the properties of encapsulating, signalling and labelling. The delimitation of their evidential and nonevidential uses is determined by three factors: existence of a qualified proposition (Belief), non-occurrence within an irrealis context and constant value of the evidential qualification when the Belief refers to a plurality of events. The difficulties posed by the delimitation illustrate the problems involved in determining the scope of evidentiality when expressed by lexical devices belonging to the content of a proposition. A quantitative analysis was carried out on 400 occurrences of the nouns, extracted from two comparable corpora. The results reveal that all the nouns except two expressed evidentiality in most cases, that the linguistic context in which they appear shows great variation in terms of syntax and information structure, and that the labelling function is prominent. The results also uncover idiosyncratic evidential expressions with some of the nouns.

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“…They have been thoroughly investigated in terms of their meaning, functions in discourse, structural and scopal properties in Germanic (Nuyts 2001;Wierzbicka 2006;Mortensen 2006;Simon-Vandenbergen & Aijmer 2007;Celle 2009;Carretero & Zamorano-Mansilla 2013), Romance (Marín-Arrese 2007Squartini 2008;Cornillie 2009Cornillie , 2010Cornillie & Gras 2015), Slavic (Tutak 2003;Wiemer 2006;Letuchiy 2010;Wiemer & Kampf 2012) and Baltic languages (Wiemer 2007(Wiemer , 2010Chojnicka 2012;Ruskan 2013Ruskan , 2015Šolienė 2013Usonienė 2013Usonienė , 2015Usonienė , 2016. In a number of the studies mentioned, evidential and epistemic adverbials have been considered within the conceptually distinct categories of evidentiality and epistemic modality.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Lithuanian, inferential adverbials (matyt 'apparently, evidently', atrodo 'it seems', regis 'seemingly', akivaizdžiai 'evidently', aiškiai 'clearly') and reportative adverbials (esą 'they say', tariamai 'allegedly, supposedly', neva 'as if', žinia 'reportedly') have been discussed in Wiemer (2007Wiemer ( , 2010, Usonienė (2013Usonienė ( , 2015Usonienė ( , 2016 and Ruskan (2013Ruskan ( , 2015. The epistemic extensions of evidential markers have been addressed in intra-linguistic and cross-linguistic studies dealing with the adverbials matyt 'apparently, evidently', regis 'seemingly' and atrodo 'it seems' (Usonienė 2001(Usonienė , 2015(Usonienė , 2016Šinkūnienė 2012;Šolienė 2012;Usonienė & Šinkūnienė 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The meaning and functions of the adverbials under study are also analysed taking into account their English correspondences in the parallel corpus. Although in individual studies, functions of evidential (Usonienė 2013;Ruskan 2013Ruskan , 2015 and epistemic adverbials (Šolienė 2012, 2015) have been scrutinised, there is no study accounting for the qualitative and quantitative distribution of perception and non-perception based adverbials across different types of discourse. Moreover, there has been no study comparing functional differences of inferential markers deriving from the domain of perception.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evidential and epistemic adverbials in Lithuanian: evidence from intra-linguistic and cross-linguistic analysis

Ruskan¹,

Šolienė²

2017

KLB

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In the recent decade the realisations of evidentiality and epistemic modality in European languages have received a great scholarly interest and resulted in important investigations concerning the relation between evidentiality and epistemic modality, their means of expression and meaning extensions in various types of discourse. The present paper deals with the adverbials akivaizdžiai 'evidently', aiškiai 'clearly', ryškiai 'visibly, clearly', matyt 'apparently, evidently' and regis 'seemingly', which derive from the source domain of perception, and the epistemic necessity adverbials tikriausiai/veikiausiai/greičiausiai 'most probably', būtinai 'necessarily' and neabejotinai 'undoubtedly'. The aim of the paper is to explore the morphosyntactic properties of the adverbials when they are used as evidential or epistemic markers and compare the distribution of their evidential and epistemic functions in Lithuanian fiction, news and academic discourse. The data have been drawn from the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language, the Corpus of Academic Lithuanian and the bidirectional translation corpus ParaCorp EN→LT→EN (Šolienė 2012, 2015). The quantitative findings reveal distributional differences of the adverbials under study across different types of discourse. Functional variation of the evidential perception-based adverbials is determined to a great extent by the degree of epistemic commitment, evidenced not only by intra-linguistic but also cross-linguistic data. The non-perception based adverbials tikriausiai/veikiausiai/greičiausiai 'most 128 probably', būtinai 'necessarily' and neabejotinai 'undoubtedly' are the primary adverbial markers of epistemic necessity in Lithuanian, though some of them may have evidential meaning extensions. A parallel and comparable corpus-based analysis has once again proved to be a very efficient tool for diagnosing language-specific features and describing an inventory used to code language-specific evidential and epistemic meanings.

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Evidential adverbials in Lithuanian: a corpus-based study

Cited by 12 publications

References 15 publications

Epistemic qualifications of the English marker likely and its equivalents in Lithuanian

Epistemic qualifications of the English marker likely and its equivalents in Lithuanian

Noun Phrases as expressions of evidentiality: an analysis of four English abstract nouns and their Spanish equivalents

Evidential and epistemic adverbials in Lithuanian: evidence from intra-linguistic and cross-linguistic analysis

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