Johan van der Auwera

Pragmatics in the last quarter century : The case of conditional perfection

Abstract The paper surveys twenty-five years of work on so-called ‘conditional perfection’, the phenomenon that if is often understood to mean only if . The author shows that contrary to what is commonly believed, the phenomenon was not introduced into Western linguistics by Geis and Zwicky (1971), but by Ducrot (1969) or even Bolinger (1952). He further argues that the correct analysis first appeared in the seventies, to be rediscovered once more in that decade, then in the eighties and once more in the nineties, and that it was neglected by those that proposed an alternative account. He tries to explain this succession of these events and non-events.

Modality: The Three-layered Scalar Square

This paper analyses the semantic and pragmatic relations between the notions of possibility and necessity and of their negations. In so doing it reconciles insights stemming from Aristotle and partially different ones expounded by Hintikka, Horn, and Lobner on the basic quadripartite, tripartite, and scalar nature of the field of modality. From Aristotle and his commentators it maintains the Aristotelian square and the view that possibility has two senses, from Lobner the duality square, from Hintikka the tripartite division of the field of modality with one sense of possibility extending over the other sense and over necessity, and from Horn the Gricean scalar analysis of the relation between the two possible senses. This paper further illustrates the basic geometry of modality notions with lexicalization patterns

Relative that - a centennial dispute'

But it would only be fair to add that there is still an essential difference between the hope that never dies and the hope that it was all wrong . (Van der Laan, 1929: 28)

In defense of classical semantic maps

Croft and Poole (this issue) o¤er a powerful plea for having powerful computational methods do at least some of the work earlier done by hand and represented in ‘classical’ semantic maps. In this comment, I will clarify that classical semantic mapping shows more variation than is shown in the Croft and Poole paper and that classical semantic mapping has properties that will not allow the multidimensional scaling method to take over. It is obvious that any semantic constellation of meanings comes about through time. Consider the map in (1). It is constructed according the conventions adopted in van der Auwera and Plungian (1998). The meanings are represented by the ovals, the connecting line symbolizes that the two meanings are connected, and the shading identifies constructions. In (1) there is only one type of shading, hence one construction, and since it has two meanings, it can be called ‘polysemous’.

A Semantic Map for Imperative-Hortatives

This chapter is about similarities and differences in the way languages express orders, requests and exhortations. It crucially employs a so-called ‘semantic map’. The concept of the semantic map will be presented in section 2.1. Section 2.2 sketches some issues in the study of Imperatives and Imperative-like constructions. In section 2.3 a semantic map is proposed that yields some insights in the study of Imperatives and Imperative-like structures.

English do : on the convergence of languages and linguists

This article surveys the debate on the origin of periphrastic do , with particular attention to the hypothesis that Celtic languages might have exerted some influence. With respect to the facts, it is argued that there are various types of Celtic hypotheses and that one type is sensible, though unlikely to be proven and even less likely to be proven to be the only relevant factor. With respect to the debate itself, it is shown that a Celtic origin hypothesis is accepted more widely among non-British scholars, and we speculate why that might be the case.

Perspectives on variation : sociolinguistic, historical, comparative

The significant advances witnessed over the last years in the broad field of linguistic variation testify to a growing convergence between sociolinguistic approaches and the somewhat older; historical and comparative research traditions. Particularly within cognitive and functional linguistics, the evolution towards a maximally dynamic approach to language goes hand in hand with a renewed interest in corpus research and quantitative methods of analysis. Many researchers feel that only in this way one can do justice to the complex interaction of forces and factors involved in linguistic variability, both synchronically and diachronically. The contributions to the present volume illustrate the ongoing evolution of the field. By bringing together a series of analyses that rely on extensive corpuses to shed light on sociolinguistic, historical, and comparative forms of variation, the volume highlights the interaction between these subfields. Most of the contributions go back to talks presented at the meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea held in Leuven in 2001. The volume starts with a global typological view on the sociolinguistic landscape of Europe offered by Peter Auer. It is followed by a methodological proposal for measuring phonetic similarity between dialects designed by Paul Heggarty, April McMahon and Robert McMahon. Various papers deal with specific phenomena of socially and conceptually driven variation within a single language. For Dutch, Jose Tummers, Dirk Speelman and Dirk Geeraerts analyze inflectional variation in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, Reinhild Vandekerckhove focuses on interdialectal convergence between West-Flemish urban dialects, and Arjan van Leuvensteijn studies competing forms of address in the 17th century Dutch standard variety. The cultural and conceptual dimension is also present in the diachronic lexicosemantic explorations presented by Heli Tissari, Clara Molina and Caroline Gevaert for English expressions referring to the experiential domains of love, sorrow and anger, respectively: the history of words is systematically linked up with the images they convey and the evolving conceptualizations they reveal. The papers by Heide Wegener and by Marcin Kilarski and Grzegorz Krynicki constitute a plea against arbitrariness of alternations at the level of nominal morphology: dealing with marked plural forms in German, and with gender assignment to English loanwords in the Scandinavian languages, respectively, their distributional accounts bring into the picture a variety of motivating factors. The four cross-linguistic studies that close the volume focus on the differing ways in which even closely related languages exploit parallel morphosyntactic patterns. They share the same methodological concern for combining rigorous parametrization and quantification with conceptual and discourse-functional explanations. While Griet Beheydt and Katleen Van den Steen confront the use of formally defined competing constructions in two Germanic and two Romance languages, respectively, Torsten Leuschner as well as Gisela Harras and Kirsten Proost analyze how a particular speakers attitude is expressed differently in various Germanic languages.

Conditionals and antecedent possibilities

Abstract An analysis is offered of the distinctions and similarities between (subtypes of) indicative and subjunctive conditionals in terms of the type of possibility — upperbound and lowerbound indeterminacy and contingency — that is expressed in the antecedent.

The semantics of determiners

1. Any as Universal or Existential? Alice Davison 2. On Surface Definite Articles in English John A. Hawkins 3. Coreference and Interreference in Anaphoric Relations: Grammatical Semantics or Pragmatics? Theo Janssen 4. The Meaning of the English Definite Article Christopher G. Lyons 5. Demonstrations and the I-sayer Herman Parret 6. Definite and Indefinite Generics Frank Platteau 7. Determination with and without Articles Victor Raskin 8. Determiners and the Syntax of Pronominals, Relativisation and Modifier-shift Bob Rigter 9. Opacity and Transparency: A Pragmatic View Sjef Schoorl 10. Linguistic Considerations on Reference Pierre Swiggers 11. Existential Presuppositions and the Choice of Head NP Determiner in English Restrictive Relative Clauses Elzbieta Tabakowska 12. Indefinites, Exemplars and Kinds Willy Van Langendonck

Diachronic Approaches to Modality in World Englishes: Introduction to the Special Issue

The collection of articles presented in this special issue of the Journal of English Linguistics is the first of its kind as a thematically and methodologically coherent set of contributions dealing with the diachronic dimension of the grammar of postcolonial varieties of English. To date, the bulk of descriptive World Englishes research has consisted of synchronic comparisons of the lexico-grammar of the parent variety and Postcolonial Englishes, often accounting for the present-day differences in contactlinguistic and language-acquisitional terms, or with reference to certain “universals of New Englishes” or “angloversals” (Mair 2003). Barring a number of forerunners (e.g., Fritz 2007; Dollinger 2008; Hundt & Szmrecsanyi 2012; Rossouw & van Rooy 2012), the grammars of contemporary postcolonial varieties have not been considered from a historical linguistic perspective, as stages in their own evolution. Indeed, such a research focus remains unmentioned in Bolton’s (2005) survey article on World Englishes research. Nor is historical linguistics mentioned by Schneider (2003:236) as one of the linguistic subdisciplines that the study of “world-wide Englishes” builds on, in spite of the fact that it “should . . . be most obvious” that “the sociolinguistic and linguistic scenarios in which New Englishes have evolved lend themselves to an investigation of . . . language variation and change” (Schneider 2003:238). While the historical investigation of any sociocultural phenomenon is hardly in need of further justification, the arrival on the scene of World Englishes scholarship of Schneider’s (2003) own “dynamic model” of the emergence of New Englishes has made the need for historical linguistic investigation of such varieties all the more pressing. As a hypothesis of a “diachronic process” (Schneider 2003:235), the model very much remains in need of empirical underpinning, in particular with relation to