Extraposition constructions in the deontic domain: state-of-affairs (SoA)-related versus speaker-related uses

Abstract

This study examines how extraposition constructions with adjectives, such as it is important to honour those who have done honour to us (CB) function in the deontic and directive domain. It is found that in these two domains, which correlate with different sets of adjectives, the adjectival expressions can function on two distinct levels, either relating to the real world (State of Affairs (SoA)-related), or relating to the speaker's argumentative goals (speaker-related). These levels have also been noted for other linguistic categories, such as interclausal relations (e.g., Davies 1979;Sweetser 1990;Verstraete 2007). Within the set of speaker-related uses, a further distinction will be proposed between text-building uses and mental focus on a proposition uses. The first type serves to build arguments, or to specify or justify the organization of a text. The second type is used to make the hearer focus mentally on a propositional content. It will be argued that this latter type is a partially filled construction in the sense of Goldberg (1995). In this sense, this study proposes a constructionally motivated typology of extraposition constructions in the deonticdirective domain.

Beyond modal idioms and modal harmony: a corpus-based analysis of gradient idiomaticity inmod+advcollocations

“…Collostructional Analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003; Stefanowitsch & Gries 2005). CA is a well-established method for the investigation of lexis–construction interaction, but has not featured prominently in the modality literature (but see Hilpert 2011, 2016; Cappelle & Depraetere 2016b; for deontic modality more generally, see, e.g., Van linden 2010a, 2010b, 2012; for German, see Stefanowitsch 2009). The logic of CA is identical to collocational analyses in lexical semantics (Evert 2004), except that it focuses on the co-occurrence of two items within a pattern.…”

Lexical Input in the Grammatical Expression of Stance: A Collexeme Analysis of the INTRODUCTORY IT PATTERN

“…The functional importance lies in their affordance to be used for evaluative purposes through their lexical meanings and the linguistic circumstance, especially the co-occurring modal verbs. Compared with research that solely focuses on adjectival collexemes of the INTRODUCTORY IT PATTERN ( Van Linden, 2010 ; Hilpert, 2014 ), the additional analysis of the verbal collexemes offers a diversified and vital dimension for analyzing the stance meanings of the pattern. The following sections will then focus on reporting and discussing what verbal and adjectival collexemes can reveal about the stance meanings of the INTRODUCTORY IT PATTERN.…”

“…However, due to different research interests and, often with limited resources, researchers rarely perform a full-scale semantic analysis on collexemes ( Hilpert, 2014 ; Larsson and Kaatari, 2019 ). Van Linden (2010) , for instance, focused exclusively on the Deontic stance expressed via the INTRODUCTORY IT PATTERN. Even so, there is the common understanding that extensive semantic annotation of collexemes will shed light on how language users conceptualize the meanings of the INTRODUCTORY IT PATTERN.…”