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Project

A comprehensive cognitive-functional account of grammaticalised secondary CTP-clauses in English

The aim of this PhD project is to develop a new and comprehensive account of grammaticalised secondary complement-taking-predicate clauses (henceforth CTP-clauses) as in I am sure/I think/there's no way he has left. Secondary CTP-clauses have not yet been described as a full grammatical system offering complex meaning options to language users. Therefore what is lacking, and what the proposed PhD will provide, is an account of secondary CTP-clauses as a fully-fledged grammatical resource expressing not just as many, but even more meanings than auxiliaries and adverbials. Moreover, Secondary CTP-clauses provide languages users with more expressive and more flexible rhetorical means of expression. This is not surprising as the main motivations for grammaticalization are expressivity and rhetoric. From my account of the semantic options and structures of secondary CTP-clauses I will develop a general model of epistemic modality that is applicable to all markers within the solid and rich tradition of Langacker's Cognitive Grammar(CG) and Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFL), on the basis of which insightful hypotheses for corpus and experimental study can be formulated.

Date:1 Oct 2022 →  Today
Keywords:Modality, Cognitive Linguistics
Disciplines:Semantics, Syntax, Corpus linguistics, Grammar, Theoretical linguistics, Pragmatics
Project type:PhD project