Frank Brisard

Non-referential uses of deictic expressions are those whose primary motivation does not lie in relating a referent to the situation of speech, but rather in suggesting a particular attitude on the part of the speaker. Together, they can be described as grammatical means of taking stance. They illustrate the disposition of grammatical categories to harvest expressive functions as part of their meaning potential. Such uses are typically relegated to the realm of pragmatics as a function of the interaction between an expression’s “canonical” semantics and features of the context. However, I present a case where the modal, non-temporal meaning characterizing uses of a grammatical marker of time can in fact be analyzed as an integral part of its semantic make-up.

Construction Grammar is a theoretical approach amenable to accommodating any conventional feature of the meaning or form of a construction as part of its description, including lectal information. This paper provides a constructional analysis of the quotative que construction in Spanish, focusing on discourse and geographical variation. It demonstrates that a model based on different levels of generalization (parent schemas vs. subschemas) allows us not only to describe the specific contexts in which constructions are used (subschemas), but also to incorporate geographical and discourse variation that could not be captured at a higher level of abstraction (parent schema).

This study presents a corpus-based analysis of discourse-connective que (DCQ) in five varieties of Spanish and across four different discursive genres. On the one hand, we show that DCQ is not only a spoken phenomenon but at the same time mainly restricted to colloquial language use. On the other hand, the results show that DCQ is more entrenched in the Peninsular variety than in the Latin-American varieties (Mexico shows the lowest overall frequency). Moreover, we also analyze geographical variation regarding the position in which DCQ is located in the turn of the speaker (heading the turn or not), distinguishing between three different profiles associated with specific regions: i) Spain, where DCQ is mostly found in initial position, ii) Argentina, the Caribbean and Mexico, where DCQ is primarily used in non-initial position, and iii) Chile, where DCQ is almost equally distributed between initial and non-initial positions. Finally, we also attested differences across language varieties regarding the type of turn in which DCQ occurs (initiation, preferred response and dispreferred response) and the internal structure of the turn (utterance in a complex turn vs turn extension, for multiturn units).

This paper offers an analysis of insubordinate subjunctive complement clauses (ISCs) in Spanish and aims to contribute to the general debate in Construction Grammar on how to deal with a highly pragmatically specified surface form that expresses several meanings. We explore whether the meanings expressed by ISCs are encoded in the construction or can be derived via independently existing principles of pragmatic interpretation. The results of the analysis are represented in a constructional network.

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The collection of papers presented in this special issue addresses the non-temporal import of aspectual constructions, in conventional and less conventional contexts and expression modes. In this introduction, we outline the notions of lexical and grammatical aspect, and how they are traditionally analyzed in temporal accounts, which focus on situations' temporal constituency, duration, and limitation in time. This serves to clarify relevant notions for those readers who are less familiar with the domain (admittedly riddled with terminological confusion) and thus explicate some of the underlying tenets of existing (temporal) accounts, which the papers in this special issue call into question. This questioning, alongside insights coming from the discussion of various non-canonical constructions/uses in different languages and from different theoretical perspectives, promises an alternative approach to aspect, which goes beyond time.

In this paper we demonstrate on the basis of diachronic and synchronic data from a variety of languages that progressives are particularly liable to be used for the expression of extravagance. We define extravagant language use as a signaling mechanism that consists in the exploitation of an unconventional construction in a given context as a way for speakers to indicate that there is something non-canonical about the situation that they are reporting. Novel constructions naturally lend themselves to such extravagant exploitation, since they are by definition to a certain extent unconventional. This is why, as we will demonstrate, the English, Dutch and French progressives were notably often recruited in extravagant contexts at the onset of their development. However, our synchronic data reveal that Present-day English, Dutch and French progressives continue to be used for extravagant purposes, which suggests that there is something inherent about progressive aspect that makes it liable to such expressive usage. This is confirmed by data from other, typologically diverse languages. We offer a cognitive-semantic analysis in terms of epistemic contingency in order to account for this intrinsic association of progressive aspect and extravagance across languages. Our analysis thus reveals that extravagance is not a transient property of emerging progressives, but that, instead, the semantics of these constructions makes them particularly liable to be recruited for extravagant purposes. It also demonstrates that in order to analyze the range of uses of progressive constructions in a unified fashion, we need to look beyond the temporal import of these constructions.

In this study we chart the aspectual characteristics of performative utterances in a cross-linguistic sample of sixteen languages on the basis of native-speaker elicitations. We conclude that there is not one single aspectual type (e.g., perfectives) that is systematically reserved for performative contexts. Instead, the aspectual form of performative utterances in a given language is epistemically motivated, in the sense that the language will turn to that aspectual construction which it generally selects to refer to situations that are fully and instantly identifiable as an instance of a given situation type at the time of speaking. We use the method of Multidimensional Scaling to demonstrate this: whatever the exact value of a given aspectual marker, if it is used to mark performatives, then it also commonly features in the expression of states and habits, which have the subinterval property (they can be fully verified based on a random segment), demonstrations, and other special contexts featuring more or less predictable and therefore instantly identifiable events. On the other hand, our study shows that performative contexts do not normally feature progressive aspect, which is dedicated to the expression of events that are not fully and instantly identifiable.

Given the common ancestry of Dutch and Afrikaans, it is not surprising that they use similar periphrastic constructions to express progressive meaning:aan het(Dutch) andaan die/’t(Afrikaans) lit. ‘at the’;bezig met/(om)te(Dutch) lit. ‘busy with/to’ andbesig om telit. ‘busy to’ (Afrikaans); and so-called cardinal posture verb constructions (zitten/sit‘sit’,staan‘stand’,liggen/lê‘lie’ andlopen/loop‘walk’), CPVte(‘to’ Dutch) and CPVen(‘and’ Afrikaans). However, these cognate constructions have grammaticalized to different extents. To assess the exact nature of these differences, we analyzed the constructions with respect to overall frequency, collocational range, and transitivity (compatibility with transitive predicates and passivizability). We used two corpora that are equal in size (both about 57 million words) and contain roughly the same types of written text. It turns out that the use of periphrastic progressives is generally more widespread in Afrikaans than in Dutch. As far as grammaticalization is concerned, we found that the Afrikaansaan die- and CPV-constructions, as well as the Dutchbezig- and CPV-constructions, are semantically restricted. In addition, only the Afrikaansbesig- and CPVen-constructions allow passivization, which is remarkable for such periphrastic expressions.^*

In this study, we address the semantics of the present progressive constructions in French and English by looking into their present-day uses and their diachronic evolution. Corpus data show that both constructions are frequently used in contemporary English and French to stress the atypical nature of situations. This suggests that these constructions share an epistemic core meaning, which we define as “contingency in immediate reality”. However, in terms of concrete usage types which elaborate this meaning in context, the two progressive constructions differ significantly: the French progressive occurs in fewer types of context than its English counterpart and it is, overall, less frequently used and not obligatory for referring to present-time events, as is usually the case in English. We argue that these differences can be systematically related to the different diachronic evolutions that have shaped the present-tense paradigms in both languages.