Re-thinking English Modal Constructions: From feature-based paradigms to usage-based probabilistic representations
| Responsable du projet | Martin Hilpert |
| Résumé |
This project relates the grammatical category of modality to human
cognition and the mental representation of language: How are modal
expressions mentally represented? We are interested in the
linguistic knowledge that speakers of English have that allows them
to choose between expressions such as “You should go home now”, “You
have to go home now”, or “You ought to go home now”. These examples
express non-factual ideas that are very similar, but subtly
different. An idea that is still relatively widely held in the
literature on modality is that the meanings of modal expressions
can be distinguished on the basis of binary features such as the
distinction between obligation and permission, “weak” and “strong”
modality, and deontic and epistemic modality. While we do not
dispute the usefulness of categorical semantic distinctions between
different expressions of modality, we question whether these
distinctions exhaustively capture speakers’ linguistic knowledge of
modal expressions and whether matrices of cross-cutting categorical
features adequately represent that knowledge. This project advances
an alternative view that aligns itself with two recent theoretical
developments in linguistics, namely the frameworks of Cognitive
Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2006) and usage-based
linguistics (Bybee & Hopper 2001, Bybee 2010). We hypothesize
that knowledge of modal expressions is exemplar-based and
probabilistic. In other words, speakers’ knowledge of modal
expressions is not to be modeled as a paradigm of forms that can be
fully described through a set of cross-cutting categorical features,
but rather as a network of form-meaning pairs (Hilpert 2014, Hilpert
& Diessel 2016) in which the forms of modal expressions are
connected to a range of meanings through associative links.
Differences in association strength account for the fact that
speakers choose a certain modal expression in a certain speech
situation. We thus view speakers’ knowledge of modal expression not
as a discrete one-to-one mapping between a form and a list of
semantic features, but rather as knowledge of the probability that
a given form will convey a certain meaning in a certain context. |
| Mots-clés |
modality, corpus linguistics, construction grammar, usage-based linguistics, epistemic modality, deontic modality |
| Type de projet | Recherche fondamentale |
| Domaine de recherche | linguistique anglaise |
| Source de financement | SNF |
| Etat | En cours |
| Début de projet | 1-3-2017 |
| Fin du projet | 1-3-2020 |
| Budget alloué | CHF 329'920 |
| Autre information |
En partenariat avec l'université Lille 3: https://stl.univ-lille.fr/projets/rem/ |
| Contact | Martin Hilpert |