Modality in Grammar and Discourse

Editors

Joan L. Bybee | University of New Mexico

Suzanne Fleischman | University of California, Berkeley

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This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers that look into the expression of modality in the grammars of natural languages, with an emphasis on its manifestations in naturally occurring discourse. Though the individual contributions reflect a diversity of languages, of synchronic and diachronic foci, and of theoretical orientations all within the broad domain of functional linguistics they nonetheless converge around a number of key issues: the relationship between 'mood' and 'modality'; the delineation of modal categories and their nomenclature; the grounding of modality in interactive discourse; the elusive category 'irrealis'; and the relationship of modal notions and categories to other categories of grammar.

[Typological Studies in Language, 32] 1995. viii, 575 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.32

Table of Contents

Introduction | p. 1

I. Agent-Oriented and Epistemic Modality

Agent-Oriented vs. Epistemic Modality: Some Observations on German Modals

Bernd Heine | p. 17

The Expression of Root and Epistemic Possibility in English

Jennifer Coates | p. 55

Contextuel Conditions for the Interpretation of poder and deber in Spanish

Carmen Silva-Corvalán | p. 67

The Obligation Modality in Western Nilotic Languages

Edith L. Bavin | p. 107

The Gestural Expression of Modality in ASL

Sherman Wilcox and Phyllis Perrin Wilcox | p. 135

II. The Interactional Basis of Modality

The Development of Epistemic Sentence-ending Modal Forms and Functions in Korean Children

Soonja Choi | p. 165

The Interactional Basis of the Mandarin Modal néng ‘can’

Jiansheng Guo | p. 205

The Discourse and Interactive Functions of Obligation Expressions

John Myhill and Laura A. Smith | p. 239

Apprehensional Epistemics

Frank Lichtenberk | p. 293

Moods and MetaMessages: Alienation as a Mood

John Haiman | p. 329

III. Irrealis Modality and Subjunctive

The Realis-Irrealis Distinction in Caddo, the Northern Iroquoian Languages, and English

Wallace Chafe | p. 349

On the Relativity of Irreality

Marianne Mithun | p. 367

The Grammaticalization of Irrealis in Tik Pisin

Suzanne Romaine | p. 389

The Evaluative Function of the Spanish Subjunctive

Patricia V. Lunn | p. 429

IV. Modality and Other Categories of Grammar

Negation and the Modals of Possibility and Necessity

Frank Robert Palmer | p. 453

A Functional Theory of Complementizers

Zygmunt Frajzyngier | p. 473

The Semantic Development of Past Tense Modals in English

Joan L. Bybee | p. 503

Imperfective and Irrealis

Suzanne Fleischman | p. 519

Subject index | p. 553

Language index | p. 565

Author index | p. 569

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