In many languages, the same words are used to express epistemic and root modality. These modals further tend to interact with tense and aspect in systematic ways, based on their interpretation. Is this pattern accidental, or a consequence of grammar or meaning? I address this question by: (i) comparing ‘grammatical’ modals to verbs/adjectives that share meanings with modals, but not the same sc...

In a speech community, people utilize their communicative competence which they have acquired from their society as part of their distinctive sociolinguistic identity. They negotiate and share meanings, because they have commonsense knowledge about the world, and have universal practical reasoning. Their commonsense knowledge is embodied in their language. Thus, not only does social life depend...

Strict compositionality in morphological theory is problematic for explaining how language-users comprehend phenomena like the partial yet non-decomposable forms in phonaesthemes and in blends like edutainment. An alternative account, based on discriminative learning, proposes that language-users associate linguistic cues (e.g., short segment or letter strings) with multiple simultaneous possib...

Abstract Among varied syntactic and semantic functions of the dative case in Latvian, attitude or dativus ethicus is a less studied one. As an optional pronominal clitic, it serves two broad functions: first, expresses speaker’s authority affectedness speaker addressee speech-act situation, second, stance towards contents utterance. In terms register, normally occurs informal interaction. The c...