A state-of-the-art survey exploring the linguistic questions of modality and mood. It will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in the fields of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and the interfaces between them.
Vorwort; Zur Einleitung und Thematisierung des Symposiums Werner Abraham: Philologische Dialektologie und moderne Mikrovarietätsforschung. Zum Begriff des Erklärstatus in Syn- und Diachronie Josef Bayer: Klitisierung, Reanalyse, und die Lizensierung von Nullformen: zwei Beispiele aus dem Bairischen Ermenegildo Bidese, Andrea Padovan & Alessandra Tomaselli: Bilingual competence, complementizer selection, and mood in Cimbrian Federica Cognola: Limits of syntactic variation and Universal Grammar. V2, OV/VO and subject pronouns in Mòcheno Cecilia Poletto: On the internal structure of q-words Oliver Schallert: Infinitivprominenz in deutschen Dialekten Gunther De Vogelaer & Jan Klom: Mikrovariation beim Erwerb des niederländischen Genussystems Helmut Weiß: UG und syntaktische(Mikro-)Variation Heike Wiese: What can new urban dialects tell us about internal language dynamics? The power of language diversity Werner Abraham: Dialect as a spoken-only medium: what it means – and what it does not mean
Modality is the way a speaker modifies her declaratives and other speech acts to optimally assess the common ground of knowledge and belief of the addressee with the aim to optimally achieve understanding and an assessment of relevant information exchange. In languages such as German (and other Germanic languages outside of English), this may happen in covert terms. Main categories used for this purpose are modal adverbials („modal particles“) and modal verbs. Epistemic uses of modal verbs (like German sollen) cover evidential (reportative) information simultaneously providing the source of the information. Methodologically, description and explanation rest on Karl Bühler's concept of Origo as well as Roman Jakobson's concept of shifter. Typologically, East Asian languages such as Japanese pursue these semasiological fundaments far more closely than the European languages. In particular, Japanese has to mark the source of a statement in the declarative mode such that the reliability may be assessed by the hearer. The contributions in this collection provide insight into these modal techniques.
InhaltsverzeichnisInhalt: Introduction 1. - W. Abraham, The Base Structure of the German Clause under Discourse Functional Weight: Contentful Functional Categories vs Derivative Ones. - H. Czepluch, Word Order in English: Old Problems and New Answers. - E. van Gelderen, Inflection and Movement in Old English. - H. Haider, Projective Economy. On the Minimal Functional Structure on the German Clause. - C. J.-W. Zwart, Transitive Expletive Constructions and the Evidence Supporting the Multiple Specifier Hypothesis. - Introduction 2. - A. Alexiadou/E. Anagnostopoulou, Toward a Uniform Account of Scrambling and Clitic Doubling. - K. K. Grohmann, Pronouns of the Left Periphery of West Germanic Embedded Clauses. - E. Mallen, Agreement and Case Matching in Noun Phrases in German. - J. te Velde, Deriving Conjoined XP's: A Minimal Deletion Approach. - Introduction 3. - Chr. Platzack, The Initial Hypotheses of Syntax: A Minimalist Perspective on Language Acquisition and Attrition. - R. A. Sprouse, The Acquisition of German and the „Initial Hypothesis of Language“: A Reply to Platzack.