Revisiting Modality
A corpus-based study of epistemic adverbs in Galician
Author
This book presents the first in-depth investigation of modality in Galician linguistics, offering a theoretical discussion of modal categories and a fine-grained description of epistemic adverbs. The first half of the monograph deconstructs the most relevant approaches to modal categories and shows how the traditional concept of modality is a problematic notion, how it relates to other concepts such as evidentiality and mitigation, and how it ought to be conceived of in order to become a more useful instrument for linguistic analysis. A new way of understanding modality is explored and illustrated through Galician examples. The second half of the book zooms in on six epistemic adverbs, which are exhaustively studied from both a formal and a functional perspective. Combining a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, the book shows that adverbs make up a rich semantic scale and establishes several factors that condition their occurrence in discourse, challenging previous conceptions of this grammatical domain.
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 40] 2024. xvii, 234 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
-
Acknowledgments | pp. ix–x
-
Abbreviations | pp. xi–xii
-
List of figures | pp. xiii–xiv
-
List of tables | pp. xv–xvi
-
Table of listings | pp. xvii–xviii
-
Part I. Preliminaries
-
Chapter 1. Introduction | pp. 2–10
-
Part II. Theoretical background
-
Chapter 2. The concept of modality | pp. 12–43
-
Chapter 3. Functionalist approaches to modality | pp. 44–58
-
Chapter 4. Modality and neighboring categories | pp. 59–84
-
Chapter 5. Modality revisited: The Galician system | pp. 85–99
-
Part III. A focus on epistemic adverbs
-
Chapter 6. Corpus and method | pp. 102–120
-
Chapter 7. Epistemic adverbs: Syntagmatic and paradigmatic properties | pp. 121–145
-
Chapter 8. Epistemic adverbs: A pragmatic approach | pp. 146–191
-
Part IV. Conclusion
-
Chapter 9. General summary and discussion | pp. 194–200
-
Bibliography | pp. 201–215
-
Appendixes
-
Appendix A. Appendix of tables | pp. 218–223
-
Appendix B. Appendix of listings (R output) | pp. 224–232
-
Index | pp. 233–234
Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CFK: Grammar, syntax
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009060: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Syntax