Edited by Werner Abraham, Elisabeth Leiss and Yasuhiro Fujinawa
Thetics and Categoricals do not belong to the categories of German grammar. Thetics were introduced in logic as impersonal and broad focus constructions. They left profound and extensive traces in the logic of the late 19th century. For the class of thetic propositions, the criterion of textual… read more
Edited by Sibilla Cantarini, Werner Abraham and Elisabeth Leiss
The selected papers of this volume cover five main topics, namely ‘Certainty: The conceptual differential’; ‘(Un)Certainty as attitudinality’; ‘Dialogical exchange and speech acts’; ‘Onomasiology’; and ‘Applications in exegesis and religious discourse’. By examining the general theme of the… read more
The volume aims at a universal definition of modality or “illocutionary/speaker’s perspective force” that is strong enough to capture the entire range of different subtypes and varieties of modalities in different languages. The central idea is that modality is all-pervasive in language. This… read more
The main topics pursued in this volume are based on empirical insights derived from Germanic: logical and typological dispositions about aspect-modality links. These are probed in a variety of non-related languages. The logically establishable links are the following: Modal verbs are aspect… read more
Edited by Elisabeth Stark, Elisabeth Leiss and Werner Abraham
The following theoretical-empirical points on the DP are discussed: Article and its referential-anaphoric properties by Abraham (Determiners in Centering Theory); Bartra (On bare NPs in Old Spanish and Catalan); identification of all functional nominal categories by Stvan (Bare singular count… read more
Approaching language change within a Darwinian framework constitutes a long-standing tradition within the literature of diachronic linguistics. However, many publications remain vague, omitting conceptual details or missing necessary terminology. For example, phylogenetic trees of language… read more
The aim of this paper is to outline that the notions of thetic versus categorical sentences are characteristic of a long tradition of philosophy, especially of the philosophy of Realism. Characteristic of Realism is a highly developed theory of the copula. Sentences consist of a subject, a… read more
The central aim of this paper is to show that Certainty as encoded by the linguistic means of epistemicity and evidentiality differs in essential ways form Certainty in metalinguistic terms (Objectivity). The paper starts with a presentation of the building blocks of the epistemic and evidential… read more
It is assumed that the rise of the defi nite article is due to changes in the aspectual system of a language. Defi niteness and perfective aspect are shown to be just two instantiations of the same grammatical function. So are indefi niteness and imperfective aspect. Defi nite nouns and perfective… read more
