Liesbet Heyvaert

The meaning of the English present participle

While earlier descriptions of the English present participle have tended to be too general or too exclusively focused on its progressive meaning, this article aims to present an account of the meanings of the English present participle that captures their full richness. It starts from the observation that many (though not all) present participle clauses/phrases are paradigmatically related to adjectival phrases, as manifested in their distributional properties (e.g. a challenging year , those living alone ). The article analyses the semantic effects that arise from the tension between the verbal semantics of the participial stem and the adjectival semantics of the syntactic slot. These effects involve accommodation of the verbal situation to the requirement that a situation is represented as time-stable and as simultaneous to some contextually given reference time. The progressive meaning is one such semantic effect, but participles may also assume iterative, habitual or gnomic readings. Some construction-specific semantic extensions of this adjectival template are identified and a tentative explanation is offered for them. Those constructions where the present participle has lost its semantic association with adjective phrases, such as the progressive construction and integrated participle clauses, are shown to display loosening or specialization of semantic constraints.

On the middle voice: an interpersonal analysis of the English middle

Abstract In this article we approach the phenomenon of the English middle voice from a functional-cognitive perspective. Assuming the distinction between representational and interpersonal layers of organization in the clause (Halliday 1985; Hengeveld 1989; McGregor 1997), we propose that the elements and relations that define the English middle are of an interpersonal nature. We argue that the characteristic relation between nonagentive subject and active VP in the middle cannot be generalized in terms of a specific process-participant relation, as has been attempted in the literature. It cannot be maintained that the subject entity is always affected by the action, nor that it brings about the action, which would obscure the difference between middle and ergative intransitive. Rather, we propose that the middle subject and finite are related to each other by what Talmy (2000) defines as a “letting” modal relation, which we characterize further as combining active and passive elements. Middles construe a subjective assessment of the subject entity, presenting it as lending itself to the action designated by the predicator, and as having properties that are actively conducive to that action. We also argue that this letting relation between subject and finite can be interpreted as the subjectification of the agentive-patientive relation between the lexical verb and the sole participant in an ergative intransitive clause. The shift towards subject and finite expressing a conduciveness judgment activates an inherent agent in the conceptual base of the predicate. This means that ergative verbs are always used transitively in middles and it explains why other transitive verbs can also occur in middles. In a language like French, which marks both ergative intransitive and middle reflexively, no further extension of middle predicates is possible. By contrast, both Dutch and, more marginally, English, which do not mark middles reflexively, also allow some intransitive and compound transitive predicates to be used in the middle voice.

How do gerunds conceptualize events? A diachronic study

Abstract This article offers a cognitive perspective on the evolution of the semantics of English nominal gerunds (NG) (I regret the signing of the contract) and verbal gerunds (VG) (I regret signing the contract). While the formal differences between NGs and VGs are well documented, their semantics remains largely unexplored territory. The perspective that is taken here is centered on the linguistic notion of reference and various aspects of the conceptualization involved in it. As they formally hover between more nominal and more clause-like internal properties, gerunds form an interesting test case for the cognitive perspective on referentiality. Our corpus analysis describes how the situations that NGs and VGs refer to are conceptualized as deictic expressions grounded in the speech event in Present-day English, and how this has changed since the Early Modern period. It is shown that only a multi-layered model of referentiality can account for the subtle differences found between NGs and VGs: while no fundamental shifts are found with regard to the traditional referential subtypes (specific, non-specific, generic), NGs and VGs do turn out to differ in their choice for either nominal or clausal grounding mechanisms, in their status as existentially stable or flexible entities and in the mental spaces in which they situate the events that they conceptualize.

Pronominal Determiners in Gerundive Nominalization: A “Case” Study

This paper concerns itself with a subtype of -ing nominalizations and, in particular, with the case for which its pronominal determiners are marked. The -ing nominals that will be looked at belong to Lees’s category of ‘‘gerundive nominals.’’ -ing nominals of the gerundive type distinguish themselves from so-called ‘‘action’’ -ing nominals in a number of ways: they can take auxiliaries of secondary tense (e.g. ‘‘. . . there was no sign of [him having been home] . . .’’ (CB)), and of the passive voice (e.g. ‘‘A serious pull would almost certainly lead to [him being replaced] . . .’’ (CB)); they are modified by adverbials rather than by adjectives (e.g. gerundive his drawing the picture rapidly vs. action nominal his rapid drawing of the picture), and instead of realizing their objects periphrastically (by means of an ofphrase), they construe them in a clause-like manner (e.g. ‘‘. . . the prospect of [their joining the EU] was very distant . . .’’ (CB)). While action nominals come close to ordinary noun phrases, the internal structure of gerundive nominalizations is thus in many ways more clause-like in nature. In spite of their overall clause-like nature, gerundive nominals can be construed with the ‘‘subject’’ of the nominalized process in the genitive case:

What It Means to Verbalize The Changing Discourse Functions of the English Gerund

The English gerund system consists of two types of gerunds: a nominal gerund (the learning of a language), and a verbal gerund that developed out of the nominal gerund (learning a language). While the formal aspects of this diachronic verbalization of the gerund are well documented, much remains to be said about the discourse-functional side of the change. In this paper, it is argued that the formal verbalization of the gerund is accompanied by an important change in the discourse-functional organization of the gerund system. Based on functional characterizations of noun phrase (NP) behavior in the literature, the prototypical behavior of complex NPs is operationalized as (i) functioning as manipulable discourse participants that are important enough in the following discourse to be susceptible to anaphoric targeting and (ii) being inaccessible to anaphoric targeting of internal participants. The results of an analysis of a set of nominal gerunds, verbal gerunds and ‘regular’ complex NPs covering the period 1640–1914 (taken from the Penn Parsed Corpora of Early Modern and Modern British English) shows that the increasingly clause-like appearance of the verbal gerund is in fact accompanied by atypical NP behavior. Moreover, the paper makes clear that the changes in the discourse-functional organization of the gerund system did not only affect the verbal gerund, but also had some implications for the nominal gerund. These findings shed new light on the (diachronic) processes of verbalization and nominalization, and on what they mean on a discourse-functional level.

Indefinite Nominal Gerunds, or the Particularization of a Reified Event

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on nominal gerunds that combine verb-like semantics with the use of an indefinite article, as in Such reflection enables [a sharing of understandings]. The indefinite article in constructions like these is at first sight irreconcilable with the uncount status of the nominal gerund, and this gerund type has therefore tended to be either neglected or reduced to fully lexicalized (count) nouns. We argue that the use of the indefinite article is functionally motivated but cannot be captured in traditional referential categories, indefinite nominal gerunds being either specific, non-specific or generic and locating their referents in spatio-temporal, virtual or generic space. Instead, it is suggested, indefinite nominal gerunds impose a more schematic type of conceptualization on the event that is reified, that is they conceptualize it as a delineated event. The “particularized”, well-delineated event that indefinite nominal gerunds profile, it is shown, is either viewed directly, as a second-order entity, or the perspective that is taken is third-order, conceptualizing the event as an “idea”, “problem” or so forth. The delineation imposed by the indefinite article can be contextually supported by the syntactic function assumed by the indefinite nominal gerund, and/or through the use of lexical items.

A symbolic approach to deverbal -ee derivation

Abstract In a number of recent publications on deverbal -ee suffixation (Barker 1998; Booij and Lieber 2004; Portero Muñoz 2003) the position is defended that the extension of the system towards agentive entities (e.g., escapee, returnee, attendee) can only be explained in semantic terms, by attributing some degree of “lack of volition” (Barker 1998) or “undergoerhood” (Portero Muñoz 2003) to the profiled Agents. In this paper I show that the semantics of -ee derivation is remarkably similar to the semantics encoded by a number of past-participial constructions. I suggest that this systematic relationship between the system of -ee derivation (which originated as the anglicized version of the French past participle) and various clausal and adjectival uses of the past participle offers a natural, symbolic explanation for the extension from non-agentive to agentive -ee nouns which is more satisfactory than a purely semantic one.

Root modal uses of should, ought to and be supposed to in present-day English : from patterns and profiles to proficiency guidelines

Many non-native speakers of English find it hard to use modal auxiliaries correctly. As far as the so-called “weak” root modals of necessity are concerned, (learner) grammars fail to provide clear guidelines about the use of these modals in specific usage contexts. While differences between should and ought to are minimised, be supposed to tends to be marginalised and its semantic profile remains vague. A study of 1200 corpus examples reveals the overlapping and distinctive usage contexts of these auxiliaries and allows us to derive the parameters that play a role in their usage: source, discourse context and strength. The article offers precise definitions of each parameter and provides a clear semantic profile for each auxiliary, thus paving the way towards more useful proficiency guidelines in (learner) grammars.