{"product_id":"semantic-field-of-modal-certainty","title":"Semantic Field of Modal Certainty","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn spite of the vast literature on modality in English, very little research has been done on modal adverbs as a group. While there are studies of individual adverbs, the semantic and pragmatic relations between them have been left largely unexplored. This book takes a close look at the whole field of modal certainty as expressed by adverbs in English. On the basis of corpus data the most frequent adverbs of certainty, including \u003cem\u003ecertainly, indeed\u003c\/em\u003e, and \u003cem\u003eno doubt\u003c\/em\u003e, are examined from the point of view of their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics. The corpus used is the \u003cem\u003eInternational Corpus of English - Great Britain\u003c\/em\u003e, supplemented by data from other present-day English corpora, and questionnaires testing native speakers' intuitions on fine-grained similarities and differences between closely related adverbs. The methodology also includes the study of cross-linguistic equivalents as indicators of semantic-pragmatic relations between adverbs. Translation corpora yield correspondences in Swedish, Dutch, French and German. A detailed study of those correspondences adds useful information for setting up a semantic-pragmatic profile of each adverb, showing where their meanings overlap and where the boundaries are. The concept of semantic maps is relied on for plotting these relations.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe book not only provides a thorough empirical study of English adverbs expressing certainty, it also contributes to a better theoretical understanding of the complexity of modal certainty, how it is related to speakers' goals and to other semantic areas. It is the first in-depth study of this kind, combining rich information on English as well as opening up perspectives for further empirical and theoretical research into modality.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"De Gruyter","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57335580950872,"sku":"9783110196177","price":194.06,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9783110196177_d0224521-7745-4336-b146-1061299fa4cc.jpg?v=1779522363","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/semantic-field-of-modal-certainty","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}