Academic essays entail taking a stance on the truth value of propositions. Epistemic adverbs deal with the speaker's assessment of the truth value of propositions. Employing a corpus-based approach with descriptive statistics and qualitative description, this study explored the use of epistemic stance adverbs in academic essays written by native English speakers and Iranian EFL learners. Follow...

Hybrid languages are extended modal languages which can refer to (or even quantify over) states. Such languages are better behaved proof theoretically than ordinary modal languages for they internalize the apparatus of labeled deduction. Moreover, they arise naturally in a variety of applications, including description logic and temporal reasoning. Thus it would be useful to have a map of their...

Several recent works on modals and tense argue that epistemic modals and similar types of predicates are deprived of temporal properties. This article takes a different stand. Although epistemic modals typically express what may be dubbed “unchanging truths”, there exist examples to demonstrate that these types of predicates are still able to express a shift in temporal reference. This being th...

Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a futuristic, science fiction novel that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans, projecting the United States’ colonial and immigrant past on to a symbolic future. Bradbury’s use of language is mostly picturesque and sensory. The present paper applies a text-oriented analysis of stylistic elements that construct meaning in the text and evoke the n...

Sinitic languages are very often described as tenseless, since they generally seen lacking ‘true’ grammatical markers of tense: thus, the interpretation time reference relies on other factors, such aspect, modal verbs, and use expressions. However, debate concerning tenseless nature Chinese has not been settled yet: several types items in have analyzed expressing both aspect tense, tense modali...

S u m m a r y Tim paper demonstrates tim problem of translating modal verbs and phrases and shows how some of these problems can be overcome by choosing semantic representations which look like representations of passive verbs. These semantic representations suit alternative ways of expressing modality by e.g. passive constructions, adverbs and impersonal constructions in the target language. V...

This article discusses the semantics of before, with special reference to socalled non-factual before and its interaction with adverbs of quantification. I will adopt a version of Anscombe’s (1964) analysis of before and supplement it with a modal-temporal presupposition lexically induced by before. This account will be extended to quantificational cases as well within Rooth’s (1985) theory of ...

Is past tense production better modelled by a Single Mechanism or a Words and Rules model? We present data concerning a phenomenon that has not been considered by either model-regular past tense verbs with contrasting phonotactics. One set of verbs contains clusters at the inflected verb end that also occur in monomorphemic words ('monomorphemically legal clusters', MLC) whereas the other has c...

It is generally held that clausal temporal, aspectual and modal features, when encoded morphologically, are expressed by or on clausal heads. However nominals and modifiers within NP can also be inflected for tense, aspect and modal features interpreted with respect to the clausal predication rather than with respect to the nominal argument itself. Such nominals (and dependents within NP) there...