IF YOU MUST KNOW …LIFE OF MODAL VERBS AFTER MODALITY

• Authors: Ivanová Martina (0000-0001-7654-300X) Martina
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Drawing on data from the Omnia Slovaca IV Maior corpus, the paper presents a case study of the Slovak structure C1[Keď/Ak už SUBJ musieť INF… ‘if/when already SUBJ must INF’] C2[(then) (at least) …] when it is used as a pragmatic modal construction (PMC) in the sense, as is customary in Construction Grammar (CxG). In CxG, the term “construction” is used for a form-function unit that is likely to be stored in a speaker’s mental repository of words, idioms, recurrent sequences, and semi-fixed patterns. Sarcastic use of modal verbs in these cases proves the notorious ambiguity of modal verbs which are often used in utterances with specific pragmatic effects. Within given structures, the former modal meanings of the modal verb have receded and have been lost to peripheral pragmatic meaning with its illocutionary function very close to a complaint or a reproach. To identify intra-clausal and cross-clausal associations of the patterns under scrutiny, statistical tests applied in covarying-collexeme analysis will be applied to reveal which filler items (in terms of grammatical and lexical features functioning as constructional elements) contribute to the degree of its entrenchment.

Keywords

EN

MODAL VERB; SLOVAK; CONSTRUCTION GRAMMAR

• Publisher: Ludovit Stur Institute of Linguistics, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Slovenská reč (Slovak Language)
• Year: 2025
• Volume: 90
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 202 – 225

Contributors

author

Ivanová Martina (0000-0001-7654-300X) Martina

• Ľ. Štúr Institute of Linguistics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Panská 26, 811 01 Bratislava, Slovak Republic

• https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7654-300X

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/slovrec.2025.2.10