The Expression of Modality

This book covers the essentials of modality and offers both foundational ideas and cutting edge advances. The book consists of what are essentially tutorials on modality and modal notions, covering definitions of modality, morphosyntactic form, conceptual and logical semantics, historical development, and acquisition. There are also specific chapters on modality in Zapotec and American Sign Language, which show the range of forms that modal notions can take. To assist its tutorial function, the book closes with a comprehensive conceptual outline of all the chapters. Key features: new series textbook covers the essentials of modality

Auteur

William Frawley, University of Delaware, USA.

Texte du rabat
Human thought and action is fundamentally shaped by a small set of cognitive categories, such as time, space, causality, or possession. It is not surprising, therefore, that all natural languages have developed many devices to express these categories. Temporality, for example, is reflected in the lexical meaning of verbs, in grammatical marking of tense and aspect, in time adverbials, in special particles, and in the application of discourse principles. Many of these devices have been the subject of intensive research across languages; but as a rule, this research focuses on particular aspects, it does not look at the expression of such a category as a whole, which is precisely the aim of the present series. The short volumes bring together what is known about the expression of a particular category in human language.

Résumé

"This attribute of EM, together with the quality of all the contributions, make the book a must for beginning researchers on modality, and highly recommendable for more experienced lecturers and researchers concerned with this aera."
Marta Carretero in: Functions of Language 1/2008

"Der Herausgeber dieses Bandes hat in der neu konzipierten Reihe über den Ausdruck kognitiver Kategorien die Messlatte recht hoch gelegt."
Ralf Klabunde in: Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 26/2007