(DOWNLOAD) "Differentiating the English Futurate Constructions: An Etymological Perspective." by Southwest Journal of Linguistics # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Differentiating the English Futurate Constructions: An Etymological Perspective.
- Author : Southwest Journal of Linguistics
- Release Date : January 01, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 289 KB
Description
ABSTRACT. English has a variety of constructions for indicating the future, such as will and be going to. English can also just use present tense alongside a future-marking adverbial (e.g. I leave soon). These future-marking strategies are not in free variation and exhibit key contrasts. Clues to the modern meanings, uses, and distributions of the futurate constructions of Modern English may be gained through direct comparison to their etymological meanings. Whereas this general strategy is not new, the focus here is to determine what etymology can suggest about broadly categorizing modem synchronic contrasts, such as determining whether an observed phenomenon results from an intrinsic distinction of truth-conditional semantics or is instead due to pragmatics. Both the prior presence and the eventual loss of historical meanings have impacted the modern patterns of how the future is expressed in English. * 1. INTRODUCTION. English has many future-marking options, as we see from the variants I leave (soon), I will leave, I am going to leave, I am leaving (soon), I will be leaving, and I am about to leave, among others. These assertions are similar, but also exhibit differences in their meanings and uses, some more subtle than others. To advance formal treatments, it is first necessary to understand contrasts pretheoretically, since choices of analytical framework depend on whether a given distinction is one of truth-conditional semantics, pragmatics, or perhaps neither, such as contrasts pertaining only to sociolinguistic, syntactic, or dialectal issues. Theoretical analysis of future marking is complicated in that categorization of relevant contrasts is not always obvious.