"After an introductory chapter that provides an overview to theoretical issues in tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality, this volume presents a variety of original contributions that are firmly empirically-grounded based on elicited or corpus data, while adopting different theoretical frameworks. Thus, some chapters rely on large diachronic corpora and provide new qualitative insight on the evolution of TAM systems through quantitative methods, while others carry out a collostructional analysis of past-tensed verbs using inferential statistics to explore the lexical grammar of verbs. A common goal is to uncover semantic regularities and variation in the TAM systems of the languages under study by taking a close look at context. Such a fine-grained approach contributes to our understanding of the TAM systems from a typological perspective. The focus on well-known Indo-European languages (e.g. French, German, English, Spanish), but also on less commonly studied languages (e.g. Hungarian, Estonian, Avar, Andi, Tagalog) provides a valuable cross-linguistic perspective"--.

• Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality
• Editorial page
• Title page
• LCC data
• Table of contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Introduction: On the gradience of TAM-E categories
  • 1. Categorization in tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality: Theoretical issues and state of the art
    • 1.1 Futurity, modality and conditionals
    • 1.2 Evidentiality and epistemicity
    • 1.3 Aspect
  • 2. Presentation of the volume
    • 2.1 Part I: Futurity, modality, conditionals
    • 2.2 Part II: Evidentiality and epistemicity
    • 2.3 Part III: Aspect and past temporality
  • References
• Chapter 2. A quantitative perspective on modality and future tense in French and German
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Qualitative analysis
    • 2.1 Representation of future tense uses
    • 2.2 Future tense in French and German
  • 3. Quantitative analysis
    • 3.1 Corpora and procedures
    • 3.2 Quantitative data
  • 4. Discussion
  • 5. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
• Chapter 3. The temporal uses of French devoir and Estonian pidama (‘must’)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The descriptions of the temporal uses of devoir and pidama in previous studies
  • 3. The results of the corpus analysis
    • 3.1 Data and method
    • 3.2 The “objective” future in the past
    • 3.3 The subjective future in the past
    • 3.4 The “alethic future”
  • 4. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Abbreviations
  • References
• Chapter 4. The competition between the present conditional and the prospective imperfect in French over the centuries: First results
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Uses in discourse of the present conditional and the prospective imperfect
    • 2.1 The present conditional
    • 2.2 The prospective imperfect
  • 3. An experiment with a multi-genre diachronic corpus of annotated texts
  • 4. Evolution of the competition between conditional and prospective
  • 5. Conclusion
  • Corpus
  • References
• Chapter 5. Evidentiality and the TAM systems in English and Spanish: A cognitive and cross-linguistic perspective
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Evidentiality and the TAM systems in English and Spanish
    • 2.1 Dimensions and parameters of evidentiality
    • 2.2 TAM systems in European languages: Epistemicity and inferentiality
    • 2.3 Temporality-aspectuality and epistemicity
    • 2.4 Temporality-aspectuality and reportativity
  • 3. The case study: Hypotheses, research objectives and methodology
    • 3.1 Hypotheses and research objectives
    • 3.2 Case study: Corpora
    • 3.3 Research design: Data collection and procedure
  • 4. Results and discussion
    • 4.1 Results: Epistemic modal > inferential evidentiality
    • 4.2 Results: Future perfect and conditional perfect > epistemic/inferential values
    • 4.3 Results: Conditional perfect > indirect reportative values
  • 5. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 6. Expressing sources of information, knowledge and belief in English and Spanish informative financial texts
  • 1. Introduction and structure of the chapter
  • 2. Description of the corpus
  • 3. Expressions of source of information, knowledge and belief: A qualitative analysis
    • 3.1 Expressions of epistemicity
    • 3.2 Reporting expressions
    • 3.3 Contexts of exclusion
  • 4. Expressions of future time: English ‘will’ and ‘would’ and their Spanish equivalents
  • 5. The data gathering
  • 6. Results and discussion
    • 6.1 Overall frequency of the expressions of information, knowledge and belief in the four subcorpora
    • 6.2 Frequency of ‘will/would’ and their Spanish equivalents within the scope of other expressions of information, knowledge and belief
    • 6.3 Correlation between total number of expressions and the frequency of ‘will’/’would’ ‘ and their Spanish equivalents
  • 7. Conclusions and suggestions for further research
  • Acknowledgements
  • Appendix
  • References
• Chapter 7. Evidentiality and epistemic modality in Old Catalan: A diachronic cognitive approach to the semantics of modal verbs
  • 1. Evidentiality and epistemic modality: State of the art
    • 1.1 Evidentiality and epistemic modality
    • 1.2 Evidentiality and modal verbs in Romance
  • 2. An inferential reading for deure, haver de and poder in Old Catalan?
    • 2.1 The modal verb deure: Specific vs. generic inferences
    • 2.2 The modal verb haver de ‘have to’: Specific inference
    • 2.3 Deure and haver de: Subjectification, evidentiality and epistemic modality
    • 2.4 The modal verb poder ‘can/may’: Epistemic modality
  • 3. Conclusion
  • References
• Chapter 8. ‘I think’: An enunciative and corpus-based perspective
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Previous research
    • 2.1 Where does ‘I think’ come from?
    • 2.2 What does ‘I think’ mean?
    • 2.3 How are multiple meanings derived?
  • 3. Corpus-based investigation of collocational affinities
    • 3.1 General considerations
    • 3.2 Significant n-grams featuring ‘I think’
    • 3.3 N-grams with cluster-initial ‘I think’
    • 3.4 N-grams with final ‘I think’
  • 4. Modelisation within an enunciative perspective
    • 4.1 The schematic form
    • 4.2 Knowing, believing, thinking
    • 4.3 The position of ‘I think’
    • 4.4 Configurations with initial ‘I think’
    • 4.5 Configurations with final ‘I think’
    • 4.6 Configurations with medial ‘I think’
    • 4.7 Summary
  • 5. Discussion and conclusion
  • References
• Chapter 9. Embedding evidence in Tagalog and German: On two types of evidentials
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Evidentiality: Yata and wohl as evidential markers
    • 2.1 The notion of evidentiality
    • 2.2 Wohl and yata as evidentials
  • 3. Evidentials: Modals vs SAOs
    • 3.1 Yata as a modal evidential
    • 3.2 Wohl as a SAO
    • 3.3 Embeddability test restrictions
    • 3.4 Force as licenser for wohl
  • 4. Conclusions and further issues
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 10. Questions as indirect speech acts in surprise contexts
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The data
  • 3. Unresolvable questions
  • 4. Surprise-induced rhetorical questions
    • 4.1 Expectation violation
    • 4.2 Informative answers
    • 4.3 The surprise-induced rhetorical scenario
    • 4.4 Addressee commitment
  • 5. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 11. Non-finiteness, complementation and evidentiality: The Lithuanian Accusativus cum Participio in a cross-linguistic perspective
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Data and method
  • 3. Types of participles and the AcP construction
  • 4. Results and discussion
  • 5. Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgement
  • List of abbreviations
  • Data sources
  • References
• Chapter 12. The perfect in Avar and Andi: Cross-linguistic variation among two closely-related East Caucasian languages
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Typology of the perfect and East Caucasian languages
    • 2.1 The problem of the resultative
    • 2.2 Grammaticalization: From resultative to current relevance and indirect evidence
    • 2.3 Perfects in narrative sequences and with definite past time reference
    • 2.4 The functional distribution of universal gram-types associated with the perfect
  • 3. Avar and Andi
    • 3.1 Verbal morphology and the perfect
    • 3.2 Data
    • 3.3 Current relevance
    • 3.4 Resultatives and agents
    • 3.5 Non-witnessed and witnessed events
    • 3.6 Forms derived from the perfect
  • 4. Conclusion
  • Abbreviations
  • References
• Chapter 13. The different grammars of event singularisation: A cross-linguistic corpus study
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. French vs. English
    • 2.1 The French passé composé (PC)
    • 2.2 The English simple past (SP): Neutral or shifter?
  • 3. Russian vs. Hungarian
    • 3.1 The predominance of perfective verbs in Russian
    • 3.2 Sensitivity to the lexical nature of the predicate
    • 3.3 Hungarian
  • 4. Conclusion
  • References
• Chapter 14. Phraseological usage patterns of past tenses: A corpus-driven look on French passé composé and imparfait
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Theoretical framework
    • 2.1 French past tenses between theoretical and corpus linguistics
    • 2.2 Construction grammar, complementation, and the analysis of French past tenses
  • 3. Methodology: Corpus and data analysis
  • 4. Results
    • 4.1 Past-tense choice at the semantics-pragmatics interface: The modal verb vouloir
    • 4.2 Between cognition and perception: The verb voir
  • 5. French past-tensed verbs as lexico-grammatical constructions
  • 6. Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 15. Path scales: Directed-motion verbs, prepositions and telicity in European Portuguese
  • 1. Introduction,
  • 1. Introduction,
  • 2. General description of predications with verbs ir and vir in EP
  • 3. Toward a syntactic and semantic characterization of predications containing ir and vir in combination with PPs headed by para and até
    • 3.1 Events of movement: Some syntactic issues
    • 3.2 Events of movement: Some semantic issues
  • 4. Comparison between verbs of inherently directed motion ir and vir and verbs of manner of motion in EP
  • 5. The proposal
    • 5.1 Scale semantics as a theoretical framework
    • 5.2 Analysis of the data
  • 6. Concluding remarks
  • References
• Name index
• Subject index