Volker Gast

List of John Benjamins publications for which Volker Gast plays a role.

Articles

This study deals with lexical correlates of the German modal particle ja in English, using data from the Europarl corpus for illustration. The central question addressed is whether, or to what extent, English has expressions that are functionally equivalent to ja. A graph-based model for the… read more
This contribution presents a comparative, corpus-based study of the arguably most common concessive connectives of English, German and Spanish, i.e., although, obwohl and aunque. Concessive connectives cover a broad range of contexts and the question arises to what extent prima facie equivalents… read more
The English scalar additive operator even has a broad distribution, e.g. insofar as it is used in upward- as well as downward-entailing contexts. Other languages, such as German, use a variety of expressions to render the function(s) of even. The question arises what conditions and determines the… read more
Deringer, Lisa, Volker Gast, Florian Haas and Olga Rudolf 2015 Chapter 15. Impersonal uses of the second person singular and generalized empathy: An exploratory corpus study of English, German and RussianThe Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns, Gardelle, Laure and Sandrine Sorlin (eds.), pp. 311–334 | Article
Second person forms of pronouns (e.g. Engl. you, Germ. du) or verbs (e.g. Russian pišeš ‘you write’) have a basically deictic function and refer to the addressee. In uses that have been called “impersonal” or “non-canonical”, the second person forms are used in a generalizing way (e.g. You only… read more
This article argues for a type of corpus-based contrastive research that is item-specific, predictive and hypothesis-driven. It reports on a programmatic study of the ways in which impersonalization is expressed in English and German. Impersonalization is taken to be epitomized by human impersonal… read more
Gast, Volker and Johan van der Auwera 2013 Chapter 6. Scalar additive operators in Transeurasian languages: A comparison with EuropeShared Grammaticalization: With special focus on the Transeurasian languages, Robbeets, Martine and Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), pp. 113–146 | Chapter
This article provides a survey of scalar additive operators such as Turkish bile, Japanese sae, Korean cocha ‘even’, etc. and related expressions in a sample of thirteen Transeurasian languages. The data is presented and interpreted against the background of evidence from European languages and… read more
The present study deals with the distribution of subject properties in ‘formulaic’ presentational constructions such as Engl. there is NP, Fr. il y’a NP and Span. hay NP, approaching the problem from a diachronic-typological perspective. Nine major types of presentational constructions are… read more
This programmatic study offers a comparison of the lexical, syntactic and prosodic devices used in English and German to encode the information structural category of ‘sub-informativity’, which subsumes occurrences of contrastive topics and of distributed (multiple) foci. Sentences are called… read more
Gast, Volker 2007 I gave it him — on the motivation of the ‘alternative double object construction’ in varieties of British EnglishDitransitivity, Siewierska, Anna and Willem B. Hollmann (eds.), pp. 31–56 | Article
Three ditransitive constructions can be found in varieties of British English: (i) the ‘prepositional object construction’, where the recipient is encoded as a prepositional phrase (gave it to him); (ii) the ‘canonical double object construction’, where the recipient precedes the theme (gave him… read more