Temporal adverbial superlatives in Dutch

This paper investigates adverbial superlative expressions in Dutch that have a temporal interpretation, i.e. that contain the forms eerst ‘first’, laatst ‘latest’, and vroegst ‘earliest’. I focus on possessive superlatives and superlatives embedded under the preposition voor. Although both constructions contain bare superlatives and are interpreted temporally, they represent semantically and pragmatically different readings, and attach to the sentence in structurally different ways. I present a semantic analysis of both types of superlatives, and I show what this entails for how time adverbials interact with superlatives.

Not the Name Alone: A Linguistic Study of Exodus 3:14–15

Exodus 3:14–15 provide an answer to Moses’ question in v. 13, but with surprising unanimity scholars have concluded that v. 14 is the heart of the section due to the supposed significance of the name Yhwh for the determining Yhwh’s original character. This focus on v. 14 has led most scholars to overlook the fact that v. 15a is a second answer to the question, and that v. 15b presents two complementary, but distinct dimensions of the deity. In v. 15b, the demonstratives וזה ‪…‬ זה, the nouns שמי and זכרי, and the temporal adverbial compounds לעלם and לדר דר, each point toward two distinct referents: Yhwh and Elohim. The first clause highlights the timeless nature of Yhwh’s name, while the second clause underscores the need to memorialize Elohim as the God of the ancestors and future Israelite generations.

Examining individual variation in learner production data: A few programmatic pointers for corpus-based analyses using the example of adverbial clause ordering

ABSTRACT This study examines the variable positioning of a finite adverbial subordinate clause and its main clause with the subordinate clause either preceding or following the main clause in native versus nonnative English. Specifically, we contrast causal, concessive, conditional, and temporal adverbial clauses produced by German and Chinese learners of English with those produced by native speakers. We examined 2,362 attestations from the Chinese and German subsections of the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger, Dagneaux, Meunier, & Paquot, 2009) and from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (Granger, 1998). All instances were annotated for the ordering, the subordinate clause type, the lengths of the main and subordinate clauses, the first language of the speakers, the conjunction used, and the file it originated from (as a proxy for the speaker producing the sentence so as to be able to study individual and lexical variation). The results of a two-step regression modeling protocol suggest that learners behave most nativelike with causal clauses and struggle most with conditional and concessive clauses; in addition, learners make more non-nativelike choices when the main and subordinate clause are of about equal length.

Zum sprachlichen Ausdruck der Simultaneität. Eine Untersuchung zum Deutschen

The paper discusses ways of expressing temporal relations of simultaneity in the German language. Although the relations can be expressed by participle phrases, noun phrases, prepositional phrases and infinitive phrases, the adverbial clause is the most frequent means of expressing the relations. The temporal adverbial clause has an almost unlimited range of application, which stretches from a vaguely hinted relation to absolute necessity, and from general statements and clarifications to definite emotionally motivated utterances. Wherever there is an obvious connection between facts, events, actions, relations as well as personal will and feeling, it can be expressed by means of a temporal structure. The subject of the paper is the influence of conjunctions während, als, wenn, seit(dem) and solange on the time arrangement of situations introduced into the time clause and the main clause with regard to morphological, syntactic and semantic elements and dependence on the relation of the correspondence between events in the time clause and events in the main clause in German.

On the Dutch temporal adverbial goed en wel

The paper investigates the origin, the development, the semantics and the pragmatics of the temporal use of the Dutch expression goed en wel ‘good and well’. We argue that the expression has developed from a meaning “safe and sound” into an indicator of the end of a preparatory phase or transition period, as well as a marker of the beginning of a new state. We observe that temporal goed en wel always requires a secondary state of affairs that is temporally related to the transition point initiating the primary state of affairs, and we show that the expression is increasingly being employed for rhetorical purposes.

THE PRESENT PARTICIPLE IN ENGLISH FUCTIONING AS A PREDICATIVE ADJUNCT AND ITS EQUIVALENTS IN MACEDONIAN

This paper investigates the use of the present participle in English as a predicative adjunct and its Macedonian translation equivalents. The English present participle is widely used in a position after the predicate in a sentence. The research is focusedon the present participle used predicatively.The research is conducted on a corpus of sentences, excerpted from English and American literature and their Macedonian translation equivalents. Consequently, comparative and descriptive methods have been used to analyze the excerpted sentences. The results show that mostly the present participle and the present participle clauses having the role of the predicative adjunct are translated into Macedonian with a verbal adverb and clauses with verbal adverb functioning as adverbial manner clauses. However, there are also examples in which the present participle is translated with a verbal adjective, also having the function of adverbial manner clauses. Besides the present participle clauses translated into Macedonian with a verbal adverb and verbal adjective there are clauses with a verb in Present, clauses with a verb in Aorist, clauses with a verb in Imperfect, clauses with da-construction, clauses with prepositional phrases and temporal adverbial clauses.