Tanja Mortelmans

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• Professor
• Professor (Full) at University of Antwerp

In this paper, I will compare three reportative constructions: the French reportative conditional, Dutch zou + inf, and German sollen + inf. Although these markers share the reportative function as one of their established meanings, they clearly differ in how this reportative meaning actually functions. One of the most important differences pertain...

In this paper, we present an analysis of corpus homogeneity, that is, the similar distribution of (linguistic) features throughout one corpus. The research is motivated by contrastive interlanguage analysis (CIA) of the Belgisches Deutschkorpus (Beldeko), in which we compare the characteristics of cohesion in second language (L2) learner writing wi...

This research, rooted in the Critical Discourse Analysis framework, employs a mixed-methods approach to examine debates on abortion legislation in the German Bundestag. Focusing on the attribution of agency to women through semantic role assignment in the context of abortion procedures, the study utilises both qualitative analysis and quantitative...

Reportative evidential markers are – in contrast to other evidential markers – compatible with distancing interpretations, in which the speaker denies the truth of what is being reported. This exceptional behaviour of reportatives is termed ‘reportative exceptionality’ ( AnderBois 2014 ). In this paper, which addresses French, Dutch and German repo...

In diesem Beitrag steht die reportative Verwendung von sollen und seinem niederländischen „Pendant“ zou im Vordergrund. Dabei geht es vor allem um die Frage, inwiefern sich beide Marker im Hinblick auf das Vorhandensein von Distanzinterpretationen unterscheiden. Mithilfe zweier Korpusstudien kann gezeigt werden, dass Distanzinterpretationen häufige...

Dutch has three seem-type verbs (schijnen, lijken, blijken), which behave in clearly different ways, although they can all be regarded as epistemic/evidential markers in some of their uses. This paper addresses the semantic contribution of blijken, its morpho-syntactic variability and the possible link between both. The analysis is based on data ta...

In this section, the main evidential markers in Dutch will be presented. Before we embark on their description, it must be noted that the domain of evidentiality in Dutch has not been studied extensively, which implies that there is not much literature to refer to. Exceptions include a number of studies which (only briefly) discuss the evidential (...

German, just like English and Dutch, has no obligatory grammatical category of evidentiality, which means that the realizations of the semantic functional domain of evidentiality are mostly lexical and typically optional. Despite this optionality, a remarkably large inventory of expressions is used to refer to a source of information, among which m...

The German modal verbs are extremely polyfunctional. They carry a wide array of meanings − objective (deontic) and subjective (epistemic) ones − and occur in a great variety of linguistic constructions: they mainly behave like auxiliaries (selecting a bare infinitive) but can also be used as main verbs. Moreover, they not only occur in the indicati...

This paper addresses the English way-construction [SUBJi V POSSi way OBL] and its reflexive analogues in German and Dutch. We argue that the different constructions are best compared using conceptual terms describing middle situations in the domain of autocausative motion (Kemmer 1993). Two dimensions are especially important: path traversal and go...

Regarding the form dürfte - the past subjunctive of the German modal dürfen - a number of things are known: the form has largely detached itself from the modal verb dürfen, it most often has epistemic meaning and expresses probability. However, a systematic, large-scale corpus analysis with a focus on the present-day use of dürfte has not yet been...

This paper addresses the (inter)subjective functions of progressive aspect in Dutch. While the aspectual profile of the various Dutch progressive constructions has received considerable attention in the last few years, much less attention has been paid to their non-aspectual uses. As we will demonstrate in this paper on the basis of a corpus study...

The present study deals with the seem-type verbs schijnen and scheinen in Dutch and German. On the basis of an in-depth analysis of spoken and written corpus material, the construction types these verbs typically appear in as well as their function and meaning are analysed. As seem-type verbs often develop into evidential markers (this is the case...

Descriptions of modal verbs in learner grammars often evoke quite abstract semantic categories (focusing on dynamic, deontic and epistemic modality) in generalized usage contexts. Yet, in concrete utterances, modal verbs not only serve highly specific pragmatic and discourse-structural functions, but can also be shown to occur in (quasi-)formulaic...

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of the semantics of the German am V-inf sein construction or am-progressive. Like its English counterpart and many other progressive constructions in the world’s languages, the am-progressive is shown to display not only a variety of aspecto-temporal uses but also a range of (inter)subjective qualificatio...

This paper investigates the uses of epistemic must and its Dutch and German cognates moeten and müssen. Starting point is the observation that epistemic must occurs remarkably more often in English than its immediate counterparts in the two other languages. By means of a detailed comparison on the basis of a self-compiled English–Dutch–German trans...

From a diachronic perspective, the evolution of the English modals has been described in terms of progressive subjectification, whereby they are claimed to have acquired the status of (highly grammaticalized) "grounding predications," which, together with tense and person inflections, relate the complement to the speech situation (the ground). One...

This volume addresses problems of semantics regarding the analysis of tense and aspect (TA) markers in a variety of languages, including Arabic, Croatian, English, French, German, Russian, Thai, and Turkish. Its main interest goes out to epistemic uses of such markers, whereby epistemic modality is understood as indicating “a degree of compatibilit...

This chapter discusses the 'reportive' use of the German modal verb wollen. It is claimed that this reportive use is of a hybrid nature, combining characteristics of both sollen (in its orientation towards the reporting speaker) and markers of (in)direct speech.

Grammaticalization and subjectification are often intertwined. Starting from the observation that two different models of subjectification are often made use of in the grammaticalization literature (Langacker's and Traugott's), we will address the question what the main differences between these models are and which consequences these differences h...

This volume is a collection of articles which present the results of investigations into the grammar, semantics and pragmatics of deictic expressions in several languages. Special emphasis is placed on contrastive studies that take cognitive and cultural context into account. Both the empirical and theoretical studies focus on the ways in which spa...

. The difference with respect to the kind of evidence evoked by the so-called 'epistemic' uses of the German modals müssen and sollen is argued to affect the epistemic contribution of both verbs in a crucial way. With quotative sollen, a genuine subjective-epistemic moment (which should not automatically be associated with an expression of sceptici...

This volume contains selected papers from the 5th ICLC, Amsterdam 1997. The papers present cognitive analyses of a variety of constructions (phrasal verbs, prepositional phrases, transitivity, accusative versus dative objects, possessives, gerunds, passives, causatives, conditionals), in a variety of languages (English, German, Dutch, Polish, Greek...