Publicaties

This article reports on a corpus-based study of diachronic change and constructional competition in the system of English complementation, with a focus on variation in non-finite complements of the adjective fearful. Fearful occurs with prepositional (of -ing) subject-controlled gerunds and with to-infinitives, which can further be distinguished into subject extraposition, subject control, and tough-constructions. Recent decades show a drastic ...

© John Benjamins Publishing Company. In this introduction, we set out the central themes of the special issue. It concentrates on imperfect function-form mappings, and discusses several cases in which specific perspectival meanings are not fully predictable on the basis of a perspectivizing grammatical construction alone. We distinguish two kinds of form-function mismatches: (1) perspective-persistent phenomena, i.e. grammatically signaled ...

This paper sheds new light on the status of the fact that-clauses as a diagnostic alternation of factive that-clauses, which are traditionally defined as presupposed true by the speaker. It does so by tracing their diachronic sense development and shifting distribution in Late Modern English. The analysis shows that in early uses, the fact that-clauses were predominantly used in contexts in which require overtly nominalised form of the clause ...

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of the English object extraposition construction, which involves the anticipation of a complement clause by an expletive pronoun it in object position, as in he’ll appreciate it that you’ve taken the time to return his book. In the existing literature, the presence or absence of anticipatory it has been associated with interpretive differences in terms of the givenness and/or presupposition of the ...

© John Benjamins Publishing Company. In this paper we report on a historical corpus study of English multiple, an adjective which underwent a process of grammaticalization starting from lexical uses with the meaning 'composite', e.g. HR 3617 is a multiple star, to grammaticalized uses as individualizer, paraphrasable as 'different', e.g. She has to perform multiple tasks at the same time, and as quantifier 'several', e.g. I have multiple friends ...

This paper studies from a synchronic-diachronic perspective the formal and semantic-discursive properties of the adverbial expressions "no wonder". They are associated with a general discourse schema expressing both speaker attitude and discourse organization: the speaker assesses a proposition as ‘non-surprising’ by assigning no wonder to it as a mirative qualifier, and motivates this evaluation by an explicit justification. The overall ...

© John Benjamins Publishing Company. Regret has traditionally been regarded as a "true factive" predicate that always presupposes the truth of its complement and cannot occur in parenthetical clauses (Hooper 1975). In the light of earlier observations that I regret and I regret to say have acquired non-factive uses (Heyvaert and Cuyckens 2010), this paper presents a synchronic analysis of the discourse contexts in which I regret and I regret to ...