Title The Expression and Contents of Non-Morphological Evidentiality in Lithuanian: the Case of Neuter Adjectives and Adverbs /
Translation of Title Nemorfologinio evidencialumo raiška ir turinys lietuvių kalboje: bevardės giminės būdvardžiai ir prieveiksmiai.
Authors Ruskan, Anna
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Pages 37
Keywords [eng] epistemicity ; evidentiality ; Complement-Taking-Predicates ; sentence adverbials ; pragmatic markers
Abstract [eng] The aim of the research is to analyse the expression and contents of non-morphological evidentiality in Lithuanian realized by neuter (non-agreeing) adjectives and adverbs. The thesis focuses on the non-agreeing adjectives and the adverbs that derive from the semantic domains of perception, comparison and knowledge and thus have the potential to acquire evidential meanings. The study explores the morphosyntactic properties (Complement-Taking-Predicates and adverbials) of the markers under consideration, their quantitative parameters and semantic functional distribution in fiction and academic discourse. The study is corpus-driven and the data have been obtained from the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language, namely from the subcorpus of fiction, and from the Corpus of Academic Lithuanian. The analysis of the morphosyntactic properties of the markers and their semantic functional distribution suggests that in Lithuanian the non-agreeing adjectives convey evidential meanings more frequently than the adverbs because the adverbs mainly function as predicate modifiers. The main evidential value is inference based on perceptual or conceptual sources of evidence. The non-agreeing adjectives and the adverbs under consideration can also express the meanings of epistemic modality, expectation or function as pragmatic markers.
Type Summaries of doctoral thesis
Language English
Publication date 2013