In addition to its use in plain future assertions, gaa is also used to make epistemic modal claims that lack future orientation. (2a) is an epistemic modal claim with present temporal orientation. The indicative non-modal counterpart of (2a) is (2b). In (2a) the auxiliary bears subjunctive mood morphology and the particle gaa, whereas in (2b) the present indicative auxiliary hai is used. The fe...

There is debate among linguists as to whether overt subject pronouns (SPs) are pragmatically obligatory in contrastive contexts. While many authors would argue that SPs necessary maintain a felicitous utterance (e.g. Cameron 1995; Silva-Corvalán 1994; Solomon 1999; Mayol 2010; Posio 2011), numerous researchers have challenged this view Enríquez 1984; Schwenter 2002; Amaral & 2005; Otheguy Z...

• Degree modifier much: an illustration of the lexical semantics of much in general. • What accounts for contrasts in felicity like the following? (1) a. a much read book b. # a much written book • Main claim: – much measures the degree to which a property holds of subparts of an object. This explains contrasts like (1). • Data: – The interpretation of deverbal adjectives modified by “degree-mo...

This paper endorses a view of argumentation and arguments that relates both to special type speech action, namely, the performance acts arguing. Its aim is advance an analysis those takes into account two kinds norms related their correct performance, felicity conditions objective requirements “correspondence with facts.” It assumes requirement certain be satisfied among set Taking this helps c...

Public apologies are one of the most prominent examples of migration of speech acts from the private to the public sphere and now commonly feature in a wide range of public and media settings. Judging by the last two decades, the act of public apology is clearly in the process of social change, although perhaps more particularly in English-speaking cultures. The paper inscribes itself in a grow...

Presupposing the Logical Description Grammar of (van Leusen and Muskens 2003), we present an analysis of corrections in discourse. In line with (Asher 1995) it is argued that the defining characteristic of corrections is incompatibility : corrections require the presence of a contextually supported alternative to the corrective claim such that the two are inconsistent in the context of interpre...

This paper is the second in a series of two papers presenting recent developments concerning the interaction between aspectual classes of predicates and the semantics of aspectual for-phrases. Aspectual for-phrases must modify predicates which are homogeneous meaning that the predicate spreads appropriately to subintervals. For eventive predicates the relevant notion of homogeneity should be a ...

This paper attempts to provide a sketch of formalism for Contrastive Topic in Korean and English. Based on the idea that a discourse structure basically consists of question/answer pairs, the proposed formalism shows 1) Korean contrastive topic corresponds to a certain prosody in English and the information structure for contrastive topic in both languages is essentially same, 2) Contrastive to...

Computer-assisted language instruction systems that only perform syntactic processing of input sentences are not able to offer advice on pragmatic aspects of language use, and they cannot handle the variability generally afforded by natural languages to express a given propositional content. This paper describes a solution to this problem implemented as an extension to the existing Japanese tut...