Benoît Leclercq
List of John Benjamins publications for which Benoît Leclercq plays a role.
2024 The post-modal grammaticalisation of concessive may and might Constructions and Frames 16:1, pp. 130–161 | Article
The decline of certain core modals in English, including may and might, is a well-documented phenomenon (cf. Daugs 2017). It is less clear, however, whether this tendency will lead to the loss of these modals or whether other changes are also underway. I aim to address this issue by looking at… read more
2023 Ad hoc concepts and the relevance heuristics: A false paradox? Concepts and Context in Relevance-Theoretic Pragmatics: New Developments, Piskorska, Agnieszka and Manuel Padilla Cruz (eds.), pp. 324–342 | Article
The idea that interpreting a lexeme typically involves a context-dependent process of meaning construction has in recent years become common ground in linguistic theory. This view is very explicit in relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995), which posits that speakers systematically infer ad… read more
2022 From modals to modal constructions: An n-gram analysis of can , could and be able to Constructions and Frames 14:2, pp. 226–261 | Article
The goal of this paper is to present the results of a corpus analysis aimed at identifying n-grams (i.e., lexical sequences) with the modals can, could and be able to. While details about the functional profile of these verbs are still being discussed (e.g., Leclercq & Depraetere 2022), it is… read more
2020 Semantics and pragmatics in Construction Grammar The Wealth and Breadth of Construction-Based Research, Colleman, Timothy, Frank Brisard, Astrid De Wit, Renata Enghels, Nikos Koutsoukos, Tanja Mortelmans and María Sol Sansiñena (eds.), pp. 225–234 | Article
This squib provides a theoretical discussion on the use of the terms semantics and pragmatics in Construction Grammar. In the literature, the difference between semantics and pragmatics is often conceptualized either in terms of conventionality or in terms of truth-conditionality (Huang 2014,… read more
2019 Coercion: A case of saturation On the Role of Pragmatics in Construction Grammar, Finkbeiner, Rita (ed.), pp. 270–289 | Article
The goal of this paper is to investigate the possibility of a cross-theoretical understanding of coercion, a “kind of contextual enrichment/adjustment” (Lauwers & Willems 2011: 1220), by combining insights from Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory. In Construction Grammar, coercion has… read more