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Title
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Inferential must from a contrastive Dutch- German perspective : semantics and constructional aspects
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Author
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Abstract
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| Although the modal verbs moeten (Dutch) and müssen (German) have a higher relative frequency than their English counterpart must, the opposite holds for the epistemic and/or evidential (in the following: ep./ev.) uses of must, i.e. ep./ev. uses of must are considerably more frequent than ep./ev. uses of either moeten or müssen (Mortelmans 2012). Mortelmans (2012) has argued that the higher frequency of English ep./ev. must can be accounted for on functional grounds. More specifically, English ep./ ev. must is argued (1) to have a wider distribution as it also expresses pure conjectures which lack a straightforward evidential basis (whereas ev./ ep. müssen and moeten typically evoke the presence of some kind of evidence) and (2) ep./ ev. must is also used for intersubjective purposes, more in particular to signal consolidation and solidarity with the addressee. In the present paper, I would like to further pursue this line of contrastive research. First, the different translation strategies used to render ep./ ev. must in Dutch and German (these involve the use of adverbs, other modal verbs and zero expression) will be looked into. Second, the ep./ ev. uses of Dutch moeten and German müssen will be addressed more closely, in order to grasp the characteristics of the ep./ev. use of these verbs, also in contrast to English ep./ ev. must. The ultimate goal is to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of how the conceptual domain of (epistemic) medium certainty/ indirect evidentiality (see Boye 2012) is structured in German, Dutch and English. The corpus on which the analysis is based consists of a self-compiled contrastive parallel corpus of detective novels. English, German and Dutch originals are taken into account as well as translations from Italian and Swedish originals. |
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Language
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English
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Source (book)
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Evidentiality and epistemic modality : conceptual and descriptive issues / Carretero, M. [edit.]; et al. [edit.]
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Source (series)
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Linguistic insights, studies in language and communication ; 297
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Publication
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Bern
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Peter Lang
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2023
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ISBN
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978-3-0343-3993-3
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Volume/pages
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p. 137-172
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Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
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