Usually, colloquial oral features in audiovisual fiction disappear when the oral language is transferred into written text by means of interlingual subtitles. Expressive devices and colloquial items are often omitted for the sake of condensation; standard forms generally substitute non-standard units; and grammatical mistakes are often corrected. However, not all the agents involved in the subt...

Many theories of language assume that the change of a language over time and the acquisition of a language by an individual are interrelated. In this paper we compare and try to relate Mattausch’s (2004) diachronic bidirectional Optimality Theory (bi-OT) account of the development of pronominal binding in English to Hendriks and Spenader’s (2004; 2005/6) synchronic bi-OT account of English-spea...

This paper is concerned with frequency adverbs in Japanese. Many linguists have pointed out that frequency statements and generic sentences have multiple readings when they co-occur with a kind of adjuncts. More often than not, the interpretation is complicated by the ambiguity of temporal adverbs and the context-dependent nature of the way operator works. In fact, frequency adverbs in Japanese...

Three age groups were tested for their understanding of present and past tense in the auxiliaries will and did, copula be, and progressive be. Children saw scenarios or pictures and responded to an experimenter’s “show-me” requests based on the tense— non-past or past—of the verb in the request. For two groups (sixty-four 2and sixty-four 3-year-olds), some children also heard temporal adverbs. ...

In this article we are going to trace the transition of modal verbs into epistemic adverbs. This development found in nearly all European languages will be analysed on the basis of Russian možet (byt’) which goes back to the third person singular present tense of the modal verb moč’ plus infinitive. In our study we shall focus on the constructional aspects of this language change with the aim t...

Adverbs have become the ragbag in grammar in which all uncategorized items are relegated. Over the years, there have been several studies (e.g., Biber et al., 1999; Halliday, 1994; Hasselgard, 2010; Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Quirk et al., 1985; Sinclair, 1990) that looked into the syntactic and semantic functions of adverbs. This paper focuses on what Quirk et al. (1985) call ‘disjuncts’ (whic...

This paper is about two competing marking strategies for contrastive topics in a topic shift context French: emphatic pronouns and adverbs. We analyse the choice between these markers one specific syntactic position, i.e. when they occur subject finite verb, different corpora consisting of formal written, informal written spoken French. Our results indicate that frequency adverbs register-depen...