Publicaties

This article reconstructs the history of very and the paths of change along which it acquired new meanings. We base this description on extensive corpus analysis, proposing an analytical model that, firstly, assigns general semantic functions to the (sub)modifier relations in the English noun phrase and, secondly, identifies subsenses of these functions on the basis of semantic and pragmatic distinctions observed in different contexts. Thus, we ...

© 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 article reconstructs the history of very and the paths of change along which it acquired new meanings. We base this description on extensive corpus analysis, proposing an analytical model that, firstly, assigns general semantic functions to the (sub)modifier relations in the English noun phrase and, secondly, identifies subsenses of these functions on the basis of semantic and pragmatic distinctions observed in different contexts. Thus, we ...

© Oxford University Press, 2013. In Present-Day English, the main determiners, the articles the and a(n), are primarily defined as markers of identifiability. Their development is usually described as a process of semantic and contextual generalization moving towards this current meaning. This chapter proposes that the contextual changes can be interpreted as reflections of underlying functional shifts. The development of the and a(n) into ...