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  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Verbs of motion and intermediate source domains of modality: the understudied case of It. occorrere ‘to be necessary, to be needed’
    Though the emergence of modality from verbs of motion is a well-attested phenomenon, the assessment of cross-linguistically valid pathways still remains a desideratum. In this paper I offer an outline of the pathway followed by the understudied Italian modal verb occorrere ‘to happen; to be necessary/needed’ (from Latin occurrere, originally ‘to run towards, into something or someone’). Based on the analysis of two large corpora, this paper reconstructs the emergence of the impersonal constructions ‘occorre + INF’ and ‘occorre che + SBJV’ vis-à-vis the personal one (‘to be needed’). The data and their analysis confirm the complexity of the pathway: in fact, the emergence of modality is strongly interlaced with the co-presence of the ancient meaning ‘to happen’, but also with the emergence of a deontic construction in which occorrere assumes the function of the auxiliary essere (‘to be’) as well as with the later evolution of another construction with negative polarity and in which occorrere is a telic metaphoric verb of motion. Though the pathway followed by Italian occorrere could be idiosyncratic in a cross-linguistic perspective, its in-depth study sheds new light on the question of how modality emerges and in particular on its source domains and their relations.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    From Static to Interactive Maps: Drawing Diachronic Maps of (Latin) Modality with Pygmalion
    In this paper, we present the diachronic maps of a selection of 75 Latin modal markers designed through the tool Pygmalion. Both the maps and Pygmalion were conceived in the framework of the WoPoss project, which aims at analysing the diachronic pathways of modality in Latin. While the description of the tool and its functionalities is beyond the scope of this paper, we focus here on the description of our diachronic modal maps. Using visualisations to represent semantic shifts is a well-known practice in some linguistic fields such as typology and lexicography, and they have already been applied to modality. Though the situation is rapidly evolving, typological semantic maps as well as lexicographic maps are still for the most part static and usually not-interactive visualisations. Our modal maps stand out not only for their interactivity, but also for the richness of the information conveyed: chronology, etymology, semantics, syntax, first attestation and diachronic relationships between the meanings. After presenting our conceptual framework for modality, we illustrate the process of conceptualisation and development of our diachronic maps of modality. More specifically, we explain how we gathered and organised the data in order to transpose it into a visual representation. We then showcase the map of possum as an example of our results. Subsequently, we discuss the results with respect to previous literature concerning both visualisation of modal evolution from a general point of view and the investigation of modality in Latin. Finally, we outline possible applications within and beyond the WoPoss project.