Modality and negation a corpus-based study.

摘要

In his dissertation entitled Modality and negation: A corpus-based study, Pieter Byloo investigates the role of negation in the expression of epistemic and deontic modality. A detailed description is offered of the interaction between epistemic and deontic expressions on the one hand, and negation on the other, on the basis of corpus research in Dutch and French. The empirical findings are embedded in a cognitive-functional framework. One of the key features of this framework is the function-to-form approach: semantic categories are taken as a point of departure, rather than individual expressions such as the modal auxiliaries. The study is based on representative samples of a range of modal expressions, including adverbs, adjectives, mental state predicates and auxiliaries. The corpora the samples are derived from are composed of the naturally occurring spoken Dutch and French.For each one of the investigated expressions, a detailed empirical and quantitative description is provided. This description comprises a discussion of the samples, the various meaning categories, the interaction with sentence mood, the effect of negation, the syntactic patterns, the role of speaker commitment, the type of state of affairs, voice and the wider discourse context. There turn out to be hardly any significant differences between the affirmative samples and the negative ones. Nevertheless, the study of negation within the negative samples reveals some interesting correlations, like the relatively frequent occurrence of negation among expression types that are able to express focussed information or the relation between the effect of negation and the scalar value of the modal expression or its factivity. In general, one might say that the presence of negation is correlated with syntactic, information-structural features rather than with semantic features.In the final chapter of the dissertation, further reflections are made about the role of negation in the expression of epistemic and deontic modality. It is argued that a distinction should be made between a conceptual representation and a lexical-semantic representation. This accounts for the fact that speakers may choose between various lexical alternatives, affirmative ones and negative ones, according to the position they take on the conceptual scale.