The book revisits the notion of deontic modality from the perspective of an understudied category in the modal domain, viz. adjectives. On the basis of synchronic and diachronic corpus studies, it analyses the semantics of English adjectives like essential and appropriate, and uses this to refine traditional definitions of deontic modality, which are mainly based on the study of modal verbs. In a first step, it is shown that the set of meanings expressed by extraposition constructions with deontic adjectives is quite different from the set of meanings identified in the literature on modal verbs. Adjectival complement constructions lack the directive meanings of obligation or permission, which are traditionally regarded as the core deontic categories, and they have semantic extensions towards non-modal meanings in the evaluative domain. In a second step, the analysis of adjectives is used to propose an alternative definition of deontic modality, which covers both the meanings of verbs and adjectives, and which can deal with the different extensions towards modal and non-modal categories. This is integrated into a conceptual map, which works both in diachrony, defining pathways of change from premodal to modal to evaluative meaning, and in synchrony, accommodating refinements within each set of meanings. In the process, this study points to the emergence of partially filled constructions, and it offers additional evidence for well-established changes in the history of English, such as the decline of the subjunctive and the rise of the to-infinitive in complement constructions. The book is of particular interest to researchers and graduate students with a focus on mood and modality, and the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, as well as that between synchrony and diachrony.

This volume presents new work on the much-discussed topic of deontic modality: the meaning and function of language relating to what is allowed, required, or obligatory, in view of moral or legal demands. A team of leading experts in philosophy of language, meta-ethics, and linguistics tackle key issues at the heart of the debate.

This is the first empirical study to focus on adjectives complemented by that-clauses. The in-depth analysis of more than 50,000 cases taken from the British National Corpus gives comprehensive insights into hitherto neglected relations of lexis and grammar. The result of this corpus-driven study is a novel classification of adjectives based on co-occurrence patterns and corroborated with the help of statistical means. The inductive analysis of corpus data offers new perspectives on and innovative descriptions of well-known phenomena of English grammar, such as extraposition or the resultative construction so...that. It is based on a new methodological approach, which looks at mutual relations of both lexis and grammar in unprecedented ways.

It is hardly an overstatement to say that Soviet linguists had a monopoly over Tajik linguistics before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when most studies on the language were accessible exclusively through Russian and Tajik. Today, however, linguists dealing with Tajik are diverse not only in terms of their location but also in terms of their disciplinary orientation within linguistics, making it difficult for the general linguist to work out the state of the art of the linguistic study of Tajik. This volume aims to address this difficulty by collecting in a handbook format recent (post-Soviet) developments in the study of Tajik that now lie scattered in different subdisciplines of linguistics. The volume thus showcases the state of the art of post-Soviet Tajik linguistics and can be used as a guide for linguists interested in the language.

This book explores graded expressions of modality, such as more likely than and quite possible, which provide a rich and underexplored source of insight into modal semantics. The volume explores and expands the typology of scales among English adjectives and uses the result to shed light on the meanings of a variety of epistemic and deontic modals.

The present study is the first to apply a syntactic approach to the grammaticalization of Chinese modals, based on hypotheses on cross-linguistic diachronic developments of modals from lexical to functional categories as upward movement on a functional spine. The temporal framework of the study covers Late Archaic and Middle Chinese. Early Middle Chinese is a crucial turning point for the development of Chinese from a more synthetic to a more analytic language. This change is attributed e.g. to the loss of a former morphology, which also affects the modal system. Against this background, the negative cycle of Chinese, the relevance of polarity contexts, and the development of a new system of deontic, epistemic and future markers are analyzed. In addition to a comprehensive analysis of the syntactic processes involved in the diachronic changes of the Chinese modal system, the study also provides a comparison with the syntax of grammaticalization of the thoroughly discussed Germanic modals. This constitutes a broad basis for further analyses of the changes in the Chinese language during its long written history, but also for cross-linguistic studies on the syntax of grammaticalization and on linguistic universals.