the present study is an attempt to explore the effect of one of the pragmatic elements of discourse (namely the conceptualizable agent) on overpassivization of english unaccusative verbs. through employing the questionnaire originally used by ju, (2000), 206 iranian intermediate and advanced english majors were asked to choose the more grammatical form (active or passive) in target sentences wi...

This paper develops an account of mood selection with attitude predicates in French. I start by examining the “contextual commitment” account of mood developed by Paul Portner and Aynat Rubinstein (P&R). I raise empirical and theoretical challenges for P&R’s analysis of contextual commitment and its role in P&R’s explanations of mood selection. There are indicativeselecting verbs that are felic...

The combination of a modal verb and a modal adverb that is similar in modal force (possibility/necessity) and flavor (epistemic/deontic, etc.) allows a concord interpretation in which the two modals somehow ‘fuse’ and communicate just a single modality. This paper presents a case study of modal concord, as it is exemplified in Dutch. It seems that speakers of this language tend to add modal adv...

This research identifies how English and German speakers differ in the range of situations they describe as causal and how these difference may influence causal reasoning. In Experiments 1 and 2, English and German speakers described 3D animations of complex events using CAUSE verbs (cause, get) and ENABLE verbs (let, enable). As predicted, English speakers used CAUSE verbs to describe a wider ...