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English evidential ‑ly adverbs from a functional perspective

Lois Kemp
https://doi.org/10.48273/LOT0682

Like oth­er lan­guages, Eng­lish has ways of express­ing evi­den­tial­i­ty, in oth­er words, ways of express­ing the prove­nance of infor­ma­tion from a knowl­edge base. One such form is the Eng­lish evi­den­tial -ly adverb. The evi­den­tial -ly adverbs analysed in this book are: report­ed­ly, pur­port­ed­ly, alleged­ly, sup­pos­ed­ly, evi­dent­ly, pre­sum­ably, seem­ing­ly, appar­ent­ly, obvi­ous­ly, clear­ly, vis­i­bly. Using the NOW cor­pus (News on the Web), the adverbs were extract­ed with con­text from UK news­pa­pers. The the­o­ret­i­cal frame­work adopt­ed for the analy­sis of these adverbs is Func­tion­al Dis­course Gram­mar (FDG), a struc­tur­al-func­tion­al approach with a lay­ered hier­ar­chy. Tests using FDG lay­ers are applied to deter­mine the cat­e­go­riza­tion of evi­den­tial -ly adverbs into FDG evi­den­tial sub­cat­e­gories: repor­ta­tive, infer­en­tial, deduc­tive and event per­cep­tion. The dis­tri­b­u­tion and behav­iour of these adverbs in main claus­es, clausal com­ple­ments and noun phras­es are explored by apply­ing FDG tools. It has appeared that some adverbs belong to more than one evi­den­tial sub­cat­e­go­ry and are thus host­ed by more than one FDG lay­er. The mean­ing of these chameleon-like adverbs is deter­mined by the local con­text. The FDG analy­sis and its tests have con­firmed the cat­e­go­riza­tion and mean­ing of the Eng­lish evi­den­tial adverbs. Although the adverbs belong to dif­fer­ent lay­ers with dif­fer­ent mean­ings, they all serve to mark a knowl­edge base as source of infor­ma­tion.

The semantic transparency of English compound nouns

Mar­tin Schäfer
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/153
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1134595

What is seman­tic trans­paren­cy, why is it impor­tant, and which fac­tors play a role in its assess­ment? This work approach­es these ques­tions by inves­ti­gat­ing Eng­lish com­pound nouns. The first part of the book gives an overview of seman­tic trans­paren­cy in the analy­sis of com­pound nouns, dis­cussing its role in mod­els of mor­pho­log­i­cal pro­cess­ing and dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing it from relat­ed notions. After a chap­ter on the seman­tic analy­sis of com­plex nom­i­nals, it clos­es with a chap­ter on pre­vi­ous attempts to mod­el seman­tic trans­paren­cy. The sec­ond part intro­duces new empir­i­cal work on seman­tic trans­paren­cy, intro­duc­ing two dif­fer­ent sets of sta­tis­ti­cal mod­els for com­pound trans­paren­cy. In par­tic­u­lar, two seman­tic fac­tors were explored: the seman­tic rela­tions hold­ing between com­pound con­stituents and the role of dif­fer­ent read­ings of the con­stituents and the whole com­pound, oper­a­tional­ized in terms of mean­ing shifts and in terms of the dis­tri­b­u­tion of specifc read­ings across con­stituent fam­i­lies.
All seman­tic anno­ta­tions used in the book are freely avail­able.

These kind of words: Number agreement in the species noun phrase in International Academic English

Adri­an Sten­ton
https://doi.org/10.48273/LOT0675

This study exam­ines a sin­gle Eng­lish lan­guage usage prob­lem, the use of num­ber agree­ment in the vari­ant forms of the species noun phrase – e.g. this kind of error vs. these kinds of errors vs. these kind of errors vs. errors of this kind – from three dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives: those of lin­guists, pre­scrip­tivists and the gen­er­al pub­lic. The study, framed by the descrip­tions giv­en in mod­ern ref­er­ence gram­mars and the­o­ret­i­cal analy­ses (the lin­guists), is con­duct­ed with­in the his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive of the advice giv­en in Eng­lish usage guides pub­lished between 1770 and 2010 and beyond (the pre­scrip­tivists). The gen­er­al pub­lic is giv­en a voice in the form of an online sur­vey of atti­tudes to the vari­ant forms the species noun phrase may take, and by an analy­sis of a cor­pus of un-copy-edit­ed aca­d­e­m­ic writ­ing that was com­piled specif­i­cal­ly for this study.

The main find­ings of the study are (i) that there is a great deal of har­mo­ny between the views of the three groups stud­ied, and that, on the basis of this three-pronged analy­sis, the pop­u­lar view of ‚descrip­tive‘ lin­guists in con­flict with ‚pre­scrip­tive‘ usage guides is not jus­ti­fied; and (ii) that the inno­v­a­tive use of mul­ti­ple con­tex­tu­alised exam­ples in the atti­tude sur­vey con­tributes to the sug­ges­tion of ‚gra­di­ence‘ or a ‚cline of accept­abil­i­ty‘ on the part of the gen­er­al pub­lic, rather than a sim­ple ‚accept­able‘ vs. ‚unac­cept­able‘ stance.