Historical pragmatics and dialogue:Early Modern English negatives and beyond

Affirmatives and negatives raise interesting issues for both grammar and pragmatics. This paper focusses on the Early Modern English negatives no and nay, and their role in the question-response system. Using data from Shakespeare’s plays and corpus methods, we note the demise of 'nay', and the specific uses and pragmatic meanings of 'no' and 'nay'. We conclude by discussing our key findings in a broader theoretical and cross-linguistic perspective

Reproachatives and imperatives

This paper studies constructions dedicated to the expression of an after the fact reprimand to a second person in the languages of Europe. Taking a usage-based perspective, it argues against earlier analyses of these reproachatives as imperatives, optatives or conditionals, which fail to capture their idiosyncrasies and overpredict both their cross-linguistic frequency and the grammaticality of types of imperative in a language. Based on a closer examination of Dutch, the paper assumes a middle position between the existing views in that it argues for an account of the Dutch reproachative as the hybrid outcome of the interaction of the aforementioned constructions and of processes such as analogy, conventionalization and insubordination. It explores to what extent such an analysis applies to the other European languages featuring a reproachative and what its implications are for our understanding of imperative semantics

Are asymmetries in imperative negation based in usage?

This article extends the study of (a)symmetries in negation to the domain of (negative) imperatives. It examines a balanced sample of the world’s languages for distinctions in tense, direction/location and intersubjectivity and observes that, like with asymmetry in standard negation, they are often neutralized from positive to negative but not vice versa. Intersubjective marking is found to be somewhat exceptional in that the opposite situation does occasionally occur. The article also tests whether and confirms that these asymmetries are grounded in usage patterns, with a corpus investigation of English and Dutch (negative) imperatives. It proposes negation’s discourse presuppositionality, which has been argued to account for neutralization in standard negation, as an explanation for most but not all of these typological and usage-based results in imperative negation too. It nevertheless makes a case for other, more imperative-specific motivations as well

Second person parentheticals of unintentional visual perception in British English

This chapter is the first systematic corpus-based study of parenthetical see, you see and do you see in British English. It compares (the relationship between) their clause positions and their uses. The results indicate, inter alia, that see is not simply a shorter form of you see but also that some conflation exists between the three markers. Furthermore, they confirm some of the hypothesized associations of particular functions with the left versus right clause periphery (e.g. see’s attention-getting use in clause-initial position) while challenging others (e.g. you see able to mark clauses in both their left and right periphery as explaining a previous one). The chapter also questions the notion of (inter)subjectivity’s value in the debate about peripheries and functions

A three-fold approach to the imperative's usage in English and Dutch

The English imperative and its Dutch counterpart have seldom been studied and compared from a quantitative, usage-based perspective. This article fills the gap by examining what three different approaches to spoken corpus data can reveal about the construction in the two languages and evaluates their usefulness. The collostructional approach shows that, contrary to the traditional view of the imperative, it is not typically used to obtain concrete results. Distinctive collexeme analysis in particular also suggests that the English imperative is somewhat more open to non-agentive verbs. The discourse contexts in which imperatives occur are taken into account more by the speech act approach, in a holistic manner. The English imperative is found to serve so-called non-willful and expressive directive purposes more often than the Dutch one. The parametric approach, developed within cognitive linguistics and systematically applied for the first time here, considers features such as power and cost separately. It suggests that the higher degree of overall force exertion in Dutch is mainly due to differences in the extent to which the speaker desires the proposed event to be realized and to which it is to their own benefit. The results are argued to illustrate the complementary nature of the three approaches and to have important implications for a better understanding of the imperative in general and in the two languages

On order and prohibition

The present article examines the claim in the literature that the negative first principle, i.e. the preference for the order negation-verb to verb-negation, is stronger in negative imperatives (or prohibitives) than in negative declaratives. To test this hypothesis, we develop – in contrast to earlier research – a systematic, three-way classification of languages, which is also operationalized as a ranking capturing the overall level of strength of the principle. This classification is applied to a genealogically and geographically balanced sample of 179 languages. In addition, we consider the role of several factors known to correlate with the position of negation – like its form, constituent order and areality. However, no cross-linguistic evidence is found for any difference in negation’s position between negative imperatives and negative declaratives. We therefore conclude that the hypothesis should be rejected

A diachronic corpus study of prenominal "zo'n" 'so a' in Dutch:Pathways and (inter)subjectification

Like its English counterpart such, Dutch zo’n has identifying and intensifying uses. The established pathway from the former to the latter is found to constitute a proportional rather than a discrete shift here. The strong presence of intensifying uses from the start, as compared to the older Dutch marker zulk, is argued to be due to preexisting constructions that are alike formally and convey intensification. Zo’n is also found to have a recognitional and an approximating use. The case is made that the former has evolved out of the identifying use and that the latter is a development which is independent from the other uses functionally but has modeled itself on them formally. Finally, it is argued that the semantic shift from identification to intensification is best captured by the well-known pathway from textual to expressive, although the unidirectionality of this cline is uncertain, and that the change from identification to recognition supports a recent proposal to distinguish immediate and extended intersubjectivity

Human impersonal pronouns in Afrikaans:A double questionnaire-based study

This paper is the first in-depth study of the main human impersonal pronouns in Afrikaans: jy ‘you’, (’n) mens ‘(a) human’ and hulle ‘they’. It adopts a double questionnaire approach, consisting of an acceptability judgment task for one group of participants and a completion task for another group. On the theoretical side, we test the different dimensions proposed in two of the most recent semantic maps of human impersonal pronouns. The first map features vague, inferred and specific existential uses, which vary in the kind/degree of (un-)knownness. The second one distinguishes existential contexts that only allow a plural interpretation from existential contexts that are neutral with respect to number. The results of our questionnaires indicate not only that the dimensions of number and (un)knownness involve gradual instead of categorical distinctions but also that they interact with one another, with decreasing acceptability and usage of hulle along both of them. More generally, the completion task data suggest that human impersonal pronouns are not the preferred strategy for impersonalization in existential contexts anyway. On the descriptive side, we show that Afrikaans has a division of labor between (’n) mens and jy on the one hand and hulle on the other. The former are restricted to universal-internal uses, the latter to universal-external, speech act verb and existential ones. The data also reveal that speakers may consider the less grammaticalized form ’n mens more acceptable but that they tend to employ more grammaticalized mens. It thus attests to the usefulness of combining the two types of questionnaire

Getting attention in different languages:A usage-based approach to parenthetical LOOK in Chinese, Dutch, English and Italian

The present article examines the broad function of attention-getting embodied by parenthetical look in Chinese, Dutch, English and Italian. It analyzes a sample of the marker’s occurrences in corpora of spontaneous conversations and of interviews and discussions in terms of a systematic typology of parameters of interactional behavior and adopts a range of statistical methods to uncover patterns of (dis)similarity. The results include, inter alia, a cross-linguistic preference for clause-initial and turn-initial/medial position, a strong association across languages with assertive and expressive speech acts and an attraction to the onset of quotations. Variation in and exceptions to these tendencies are observed too. The findings are explained with reference to phenomena such as persistence and entrenchment and contribute to a better understanding not only of attention-getting in different languages but also of intersubjectivity, constructed dialogue, and illocutional concurrences