Renaat Declerck

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• Phd English Linguistics
• Professor Emeritus at KU Leuven

This is a book on copular sentences in which ample attention is devoted to so-called cleft and pseudo-cleft sentences. (I myself will speak of it-clefts and WH-clefts and use the label cleft as a cover-term for both.) It is not a book that is written within a theoretical framework, or which is meant to adduce evidence either for or against one of t...

This chapter offers a definition of modality that is as concrete and complete as possible. Modality means that there is reference to actualization of a situation in a world that is not represented as being the factual world. All types of modality are pigeonholed, regardless of whether the 'modalizer' is an auxiliary, lexical verb, adverb, condition...

This article argues that be to is primarily a modal auxiliary expressing the necessity of future actualization of the ‘residue-situation’ (= the situation referred to by the clause minus be to ). Eight possible ‘M-origins’ (= origins of the necessity) are identified. The ‘futurish’ use of be to in present-day English is closely related to these mod...

In reported speech, a that-clause depending on a reporting verb in the past tense can under certain conditions use the present tense instead of the past tense: He said that his name was/is John. The conditions in question have often been discussed in the literature (see especially Riddle 1978). The present article concentrates on the factors that h...

The linguistic literature often makes use of the terms '(im)perfective', '(a)telic' and/or '(non)bounded' (as well as other terms like 'terminative', 'conclusive', etc.). However, there is a lot of confusion about the definitions as well as the applicability and relevance of these concepts. In this article we aim to resolve this confusion. We will...

This paper present an in-depth analysis of the tenses used in counterfactual conditionals in English. Counterfactual conditionals follow three main patterns: (i) I would be safer if John was with me, (ii) I would have felt safer if John had been with me, or (iii) a blending of these. Both the conditional clause and the head clause may in principle...

The Grammar of the English Tense System forms the first volume of a four-volume set, The Grammar of the English Verb Phrase. The other volumes, to appear over the next few years, will deal with mood and modality, aspect and voice.The book aims to provide a grammar of tense which can be used both as an advanced reference grammar (for example by MA-l...

Some nonmodal tense forms (e.g. thought) can trigger one or two kinds of modal interpretation, viz. suspended factuality (implicating present counterfactuality) of the complement clause (I thought you weren't married) or discourse tentativeness (I thought you might lend me your camera). The authors explain how this nonmodal use of the past tense –...

This study examines how reference to spatial boundaries can make speakers of English represent or understand a motion event as temporally bounded. Spatial boundaries can be implied by (a) the path expressed by a directional item, (b) the so-called “landmark” [Langacker, Ronald W., 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. I: Theoretical Perspect...

This study treats the crucial concept of point of view (henceforth PoV) as comprising three major but distinct sub-types-communicative PoV (the here-and-now of encoder or decoder), experiencer's point of view, or narrative point of view-but with the proviso that the first of these can in fact be subsumed under the third. The sub-types can be distin...

This book is an extremely detailed and comprehensive examination of conditional sentences in English, using many examples from actual language-use. The syntax and semantics of conditionals (including tense and mood options) and the functions of conditionals in discourse are examined in depth, producing an all-round linguistic view of the subject wh...

The authors describe the various aspects of interpretation of even if conditionals. The following are their main findings: (a) it is (part of) the invariant meaning of even that this focusing adverb evokes a sense of "expected incompatibility" (b) in "implicative conditionals" (=those interpreted as 'P lends to Q') this sense of expected incompatib...

In this article the authors examine six different analyses of the meaning of unless that have been argued in the literature, and present a new analysis in which a careful distinction is made between the semantic meaning and the pragmatic interpretations of unless. Contrary to the common belief that unless cannot be used in irrealis conditionals, it...

The aim of this article is to examine the possible relations between form and meaning in some formal types of conditionals. To keep the investigation within manageable proportions, the author restricts himself to the three "canonical"forms of conditionals: the types illustrated by I will do it if you help me, I would do it if you helped me and I wo...

Salkie & Reed (1997) offer a ‘pragmatic hypothesis’ of tense in reported speech which runs counter to Jespersen's & Comrie's quotative or ‘sequence of tenses’ analysis as well as to the more semantically based analysis proposed by Declerck (1990b, 1991a). In doing so they also cast doubt on the model of the English tense system which was proposed b...

This article is a critical comment on Naoaki Wada's theory of tense, and its application to indirect speech, as it is to be found in Wada (1998a, 1998b). The author raises a number of (what he considers to be) problems for this theory. He also defends his own theory of tense against the criticism which Wada levels at it.

The standard analysis of the past perfect is that it represents the time of a situation as anterior to a time of orientation which is itself past with respect to the time of speech. However, there are a couple of uses in which the situation referred to actually lies in the future. This article concentrates on one of these uses, illustrated by sente...

This paper offers a typology of English when-clauses (WCs) on the basis of their semantic, syntactic and functional characteristics. It distinguishes six major classes of dependent WCs: WCs used as indirect questions, relative clauses, free relative clauses in nominal function, adverbial WCs, narrative WCs and atemporal WCs. A further subciassifica...

This article presents an analysis of the temporal structure expressed by when and examines the possibilities of tense choice in adverbial when clauses and in the superordinate clauses supporting them. It argues that when is a free relative adverb rather than a conjunction, and that it establishes a "common frame" that includes both a time of orient...

Traditional analyses of the past tense such as Reichenbach's (1947) and Comrie's (1985) assign a single semantic structure to the past tense and do not distinguish between absolute and relative past tenses in English. In the present article it is argued that we cannot do without the notion of a relative past tense. Ten empirically based arguments a...

The problem of not. .. unti/* RENAAT DECLERCK This artiele addresses the uestion why sentences like John didn't wake up until nine are grammatica while their positive counterparts are not: *John woke up unti1 nine. It ad uces evidence against the two existing analyses (the one claiming that not is a durative predicate, the other that there is a neg...

As is well known, some types of subclause in English differ from independent clauses in that they require a different tense form when the reference is to the future. We say I will be happy if the weather is nice tomorrow , but not *I am happy if the weather is nice tomorrow or *I will be happy if the weather will be nice tomorrow. As is clear from...

This review article offers some criticism of Collins (1991). The author challenges Collins' basic claim that, as far as their information structure is concerned, clefts and pseudo-clefts require a different type of taxonomy (more specifically that the three type classification of clefts cannot be extended to pseudo-clefts). He also argues that Coll...

The starting-point of this article is the puzzling fact that only (at) five o'clock is interpreted as ‘as early as five o'clock’ in It’s only five o’clock and as ‘as late as five o'clock’ in We were only back at five o’clock. (There is a similar paradox when already is used.) The article offers a solution to the puzzle and explores some theoretical...

The major part of this article is devoted to sentences of the type (If he's absent) it's no doubt he is ill. It is argued that these sentences derive their typical aspects of meaning from the fact that they are ‘specificational’ and that they can probably be analysed as reduced clefts. It is shown that they are inferential in two ways: the that-cla...

The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.

This article suggests an answer to the question why certain utterances are interpreted as generic whereas others are not. The author argues that a generic interpretation is not exclusively determined by the semantics of the sentence. Rather it follows from the way in which the semantics are melded with the pragmatics of the context and with the hea...

In this article the authors discuss sentences of the type If anyone can help you, it's Bill. After identifying the typical syntactic properties of this construction (and similar ones), they argue that the it-clause is a reduced it-cleft, thus rejecting Meier's (1988) claim that ‘if clefts’ should be treated as a separate subclass of clefts next to...

This paper investigates the meanings of the tenses and the system of time reference in English. It starts from a discussion of the celebrated theory of Reichenbach (1947) and the alternative recently proposed in Comrie's (1985) book on tense. The author argues that both theories are dificient in certain respects, and develops a theory which both re...

The terms definite and indefinite, when used in relation to NPs, can be handled in two different ways. One can treat definiteness as a formal (syntactico-morphological) category and make use of the syntactic features [±definite], as in Chomsky (1965). One can also go into the question of how definite and indefinite NPs are used, i.e. the question o...

The author observes that generic sentences like Ted votes for liberals are unspecified for a number of distinctions and may therefore be true descriptions of a variety of situations. Thus, the above sentence does not tell us (a) whether Ted votes only for liberals or for other candidates as well; (b) whether Ted votes at every election or only at s...

This article is concerned with the principles that govern the use of it-clefts and WH-clefts in discourse. The main points argued are (a) that both it-clefts and WH-clefts fall apart into three major subtypes, and (b) that, although it-clefts and WH-clefts basically have the same meaning and function, there are many pragmatic factors that may induc...

This article deals with possible exceptions to the handbook rule that nonvolitional (i.e. nonmodal) will and hypothetical would cannot be used in conditional clauses. Nine different kinds of exceptions are identified and an explanation is provided of the fact that will/would may be used in such structures.

It is well known that a cleft whose focal item functions as predicate nominal in the WH/that -clause is often unacceptable, or at least questionable: (I) (a) *It's a genius that he is. (Leech & Svartvik, 1975: 181) (b) *It's a conductor that John is. (Stockwell et al. 1977:107) (c) *It's the football coach that John is. (Emonds, 1976:140) In this a...

Clefts have always been considered to be ‘specificational’ (identifying, specifying a value for a variable). While recognizing that this is basically correct, this article examines the possibility that there might be exceptions to this rule. A first obvious candidate, viz. the proverbial type It is a long lane that has no turning, is discarded as n...

In this article the author investigates the mechanism that underlies the selection of it versus he/she/they as the subject of sentences of the type ‘Pronoun be NP’ where the predicate NP has a human referent. Previous solutions of this problem are shown to be inadequate and new principles are proposed. It is argued that it-sentences of the type dis...

This article will be concerned with the structure of Infinitival Perception Verb Complements (henceforth: IPVC’s), i.e. with constructions involving ‘bare’ (‘naked’) infinitives, as in I saw/heard/smelt Tom light a cigarette. For structures like this no fewer than five analyses have been proposed within the framework of transformational grammar. In...

In this article the author investigates possible analyses of Dutch sentences of the type Ik Zag jan/open (‘I saw John run’). A number of arguments are adduced against four analyses that have been proposed in transformational grammar, viz. the Equi analysis, the nonsentential analysis, the bare S analysis and the Subject-to-Object Raising analysis....

This article draws attention to the fact that in certain constructions relative or participial clauses are ‘pseudo-modifiers’, i.e. they have the superficial syntactic characteristics of modifying clauses but lack the restrictive or nonrestrictive (appositive) meaning typical of such relative and participial clauses. Four typical cases of such pseu...

This paper deals with the bounded/unbounded (telic/atelic) distinction which is relevant to the study of aspect (more specifically, ‘Aktionsart ’) but which has been defined in different ways and has been applied to different objects in the linguistic literature. In this paper the author aims (1) to clear up some of the confusion by formulating an...

FraserBruce, The verb–particle combination in English. Taishukan Studies in Modern Linguistics. New York: Academic Press, 1976, pp. vii + 125. - Volume 14 Issue 2 - Renaat Declerk

1. One of the most influential articles on noun phrases that have been published in the field of transformational grammar is no doubt Emmon Bach's celebrated paper ‘Nouns and noun phrases’, which he published in 1968. According to Bach there is both syntactic and semantic evidence that typically predicative nouns such as idiot, dope, angel, etc. ar...

G. PelliMario, Verb-particle constructions in American English. Bern: Francke, 1976. Pp. iv + 160. - Volume 14 Issue 1 - Renaat Declerck