The Semantic Field of Modal Certainty: A Corpus-Based Study of English Adverbs

408 Pages·2007·1.51 MB·English

by  Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen

The Semantic Field of Modal Certainty
≥
Topics in English Linguistics
56
Editors
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Bernd Kortmann
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
The Semantic Field
of Modal Certainty
A Corpus-Based Study of English Adverbs
by
Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen
Karin Aijmer
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
MoutondeGruyter(formerlyMouton,TheHague)
isaDivisionofWalterdeGruyterGmbH&Co.KG,Berlin.
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LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Simon-Vandenbergen,A.M.
The semantic field of modal certainty : a corpus-based study of
English adverbs / by Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen, Karin
Aijmer.
p.cm.(cid:2)(TopicsinEnglishlinguistics;56)
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindexes.
ISBN978-3-11-019617-7(hardcover:alk.paper)
1.Englishlanguage(cid:2)Adverb. 2.Englishlanguage(cid:2)Modality.
3. English language (cid:2) Semantics. 4. Field theory (Linguistics)
I.Aijmer,Karin. II.Title.
PE1325.S56 2007
425(cid:2)dc22
2007035002
ISBN 978-3-11-019617-7
ISSN 1434-3452
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Acknowledgements
This book is the outcome of intensive cooperation between the authors over
a period of five years. This extended collaboration would not have been
possible without the generous support of two Flemish institutions. In the
first place we gratefully acknowledge an Academy Award Fellowship
given to Karin Aijmer by the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sci-
ence and the Arts. This made it possible for Karin to spend a sabbatical in
Belgium and for the two authors to devote six months to joint research at
the Flemish Academic Centre in Brussels in the autumns of 2001 and 2002.
The stay at the Academy was an invigorating experience and the daily con-
tact made it possible to work closely together and to exchange ideas in
stimulating surroundings. We are especially indebted to the Director of the
Flemish Academic Centre, Professor Nicholas Schamp, for his keen interest
in our research and for making our stay at the Centre both pleasant and
rewarding. Research in this period focused on discourse markers in a con-
trastive perspective and led to the plan to write a book on modal adverbs in
English, using monolingual as well as cross-linguistic data.
The joint work was continued in Sweden thanks to a generous grant
given to Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen by the Fund for Scientific Re-
search – Flanders, which made it possible for her to spend a six-month
sabbatical at Göteborg University from October 2003 till April 2004.
The book in its present form owes a lot to fellow linguists. We owe a
special debt of gratitude to Bengt Altenberg, Eirian Davies, and Diana
Lewis for having spent their precious time on critically reading several
chapters of the book. Their comments have been invaluable and have
greatly improved the final version. We are also grateful to the native speak-
ers of English who served as informants and filled in the test question-
naires. They are Rhonwen Bowen, Sally Boyd, David Chan, Beverley
Collins, Sandra Collins, Peter Flynn, Jennifer Herriman, Jim O’Driscoll,
Lynn O’Driscoll, and Anne Wichmann.
We are grateful to Stig Johansson for giving us access to the Oslo Multi-
lingual Corpus and to Hans Paulussen for providing us with data from the
Trilingual Parallel Corpus.
Bernard De Clerck deserves special thanks for his help in retrieving data
from various corpora. Even though he was himself in the middle of his PhD
research he was always generous with his time, and his efficiency was ex-
vi Acknowledgements
tremely pleasant. Also Göran Kjellmer’s interest in our research, his keen
observations and his help with the Cobuild data have been greatly appreci-
ated.
Lars Malmsten was always on standby when we had computer problems
and he took care of the lay-out of the first version of this book, which was
sent to the editors in 2005. The final version was very competently made
camera-ready by Geert Bonamie, for which our sincere thanks.
Both authors have discussed their work at conferences and seminars
over the years and thus received valuable feedback from fellow partici-
pants. We cannot thank all colleagues who have contributed to the book
indirectly in this way but we are aware of the crucial importance of the
exchange of ideas at research forums.
A final word of thanks is due to Elizabeth Traugott, who gave much ap-
preciated advice on the book in its final stages. Her critical questions and
pertinent comments have made us reflect more deeply on a number of is-
sues.
It goes without saying that we take full responsibility for the final prod-
uct and its remaining shortcomings.
Ghent and Göteborg, July 2006 Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen
and Karin Aijmer
Table of contents
Acknowledgements v
Chapter 1 1
Aims, methodology and data 1
1.1. Why this book is needed and what it is about 1
1.2. Modality and pragmatics 3
1.3. Aims 5
1.4. Methodology 6
1.5. Outline of the book 9
Chapter 2 10
Establishing meaning relations: Problems and solutions 10
2.1. Introduction 10
2.2. Traditional theories of field semantics 10
2.3. The representation of non-discreteness in the conceptual
field 12
2.4. Frame semantics 13
2.5. Semantic fields and feature decomposition 15
2.6. Methods to analyse semantic fields based on similarity
and adjacency 16
2.7. Multifunctionality and translation paradigms 17
2.8. The representation problem – semantic maps 19
2.9. Lexical items and patterns 21
2.10. Summing up: the procedure used to study semantic
relations in this work 22
Chapter 3 24
The linguistic categories of modality and evidentiality 24
3.1. Introduction 24
3.2. Chafe (1986): A broad view of evidentiality 24
3.3. Faller (2002): A narrow view of evidentiality 29
3.4. Evidentials, modals and degrees of commitment 31
3.5. Adverbs of certainty and the assertive sentence 32
3.6. Subjectivity and evidentiality 33
3.7. Mirativity: how relevant is it in the English system? 36
3.8. Conclusion 38
viii Table of contents
Chapter 4 40
An integrated model for describing adverbs of certainty 40
4.1. Introduction 40
4.2. Heteroglossia and rhetorical function 40
4.3. Indexicality and the context 44
4.4. Reflexivity 49
4.5. Levels of meaning 51
Chapter 5 57
Classification of adverbs of certainty 57
5.1. Introduction 57
5.2. Classifications of adverbs of certainty in grammars 57
5.3. Studies of modal adverbials in English 64
5.4. The list of adverbs studied in this book 69
5.5. The meaning of modal adverbs 71
5.6. Adverbs of certainty 74
5.7. A contrastive perspective 77
Chapter 6 80
The epistemic certainty adverbs certainly, definitely, indeed:
Syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions 80
6.1. Introduction 80
6.2. A note on frequencies 80
6.3. A syntagmatic approach 81
6.4. A paradigmatic approach: the use of translation
paradigms 83
6.5. Subclassification of the adverbs of certainty 83
6.6. Certainly 85
6.7. Definitely 97
6.8. Indeed 104
6.9. Summing up 119
Chapter 7 121
The epistemic certainty adverbs no doubt, surely: Syntagmatic and
paradigmatic dimensions 121
7.1. No doubt and related expressions 121
7.2. Surely 134
7.3. Summing up 145
Table of contents ix
Chapter 8 147
Evidential, expectation and speech act adverbs: Syntagmatic and
paradigmatic dimensions 147
8.1. Evidential adverbs 147
8.2. Expectation adverbs 172
8.3. Speech act adverbs 191
Chapter 9 195
Adverbs of certainty and the wider context: Text types and genres 195
9.1. Introduction 195
9.2. Distribution in corpora 195
9.3. Of course 204
9.4. Certainly 210
9.5. Indeed 214
9.6. Obviously 219
9.7. Clearly 223
9.8. Definitely 227
9.9. Surely 229
9.10. Naturally 235
9.11. No doubt 236
9.12. A note on undoubtedly 243
9.13. Conclusions: a comparison with previous studies 244
Chapter 10 247
Semantic-pragmatic relations: Networks and maps 247
10.1. Introduction 247
10.2. The method of establishing translation networks 247
10.3. The translation networks in four languages 249
10.4. The evidential adverbs obviously,clearly,evidently 254
10.5. Certainly, surely, definitely, indeed, no doubt 257
10.6. Expectation markers: of course andnaturally 261
10.7. Coded and pragmatic meanings 262
10.8. Networks as the basis for semantic maps 263
Chapter 11 278
Semantic-pragmatic relations: Parameters and features 278
11.1. Introduction 278
11.2. Parameters and features 278
11.3. Position in the clause 280
11.4. Scope 283
x Table of contents
11.5. Modal status 283
11.6. Heteroglossic functions 304
11.7. Discourse functions 308
11.8. Indexical stance 311
11.9. Register: speech and writing 314
11.10. Connecting adverbs: clusters based on the feature
analysis 315
11.11. Connecting features and translations 318
Chapter 12 321
Conclusions 321
Appendix 325
Notes 369
References 371
Index of names 387
Index of subjects 389
Abbreviations of corpora 396