Hedging strategies, i.e. downtoning expressions or expressions of tentativeness or possibility, are ubiquitous in most, if not all, languages. However, hedging is often realised differently across languages, making such ...

The Verb-second (V2) phenomenon is one of the central issues of modern linguistic theory. This volume examines V2 from a micro-perspective, comparing various languages and periods. At the heart of the work presented here ...

Indefinites face competition at two levels: Presupposition and content. The antipresupposition hypothesis predicts that they signal the opposite of familiarity, or uniqueness, namely, novelty, or non-uniqueness. At the ...

Drawing on diachronic data from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), this paper starts by testing the initial hypothesis that the resultative ADJ enough that construction is on the increase. One complicating ...

Multistability refers to those moments in a narrative when readers are made aware of two mutually exclusive possibilities, conceived as an analogy to the visual illusion of the duck-rabbit, which can be seen either as a ...

This paper considers the placement of adverbial clauses in English and Norwegian with regard to their form, meaning, information status and semantic relation to the matrix clause proposition. The study is based on comparable ...

The paper shows how the semantically underspecified imperfective aspect in Russian becomes associated with counterfactual complete events in specific contexts, notably in chess annotations (Restan 1989), while the perfective ...

The Arctic is an imagined space as much as a geographical place; our ideas and understanding of the region are based both in the fictional and the factual. Aritha van Herk’s Places Far From Ellesmere (1990) combines multiple ...