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\"This book is a cross-linguistic and interdisciplinary exploration of modality within systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Drawing upon the broad SFL notion of modality that refers to the intermediate degrees between the positive and negative poles, the individual papers probe into the modality systems in English and Japanese. The papers cover issues such as the conceptual nature of modality in both languages, the characterization of modulation in Japanese, the trans-grammatical aspects of modality in relation to mood and grammatical metaphor in both languages, and the modality uses and pragmatic impairment by individuals with a developmental disorder from a neurocognitive perspective. The book demonstrates a functional account of Japanese within an SFL model of language with a fresh perspective to Japanese linguistics. It also refers to cross-linguistic issues concerning how the principles and theories of SFL serve to empirically elaborate descriptions of individual languages, which will lead to the enrichment of the theory and practice of linguistics and beyond.\"-- Provided by publisher.

Hierarchical clause structure is an important feature of most theories of grammar. While it has been an indispensable part of formal syntactic theories, functional theories have more recently discovered for themselves a 'layered structure of the clause'. A major focus of the current discussion on semanto-syntactic clause structure is the hierarchical ordering of grammatical categories such as tense, aspect and modality. However, there are very few empirical studies yet to provide systematic evidence for presumably universal hierarchical structures. This book presents a systematic corpus-based study of the semantic and morphosyntactic interaction of modality with tense, aspect, negation, and modal markers embedded in subordinate clauses. The results are critically compared with extant theories of hierarchies of grammatical categories, including those in Functional Grammar, Role and Reference Grammar, and the Cartography of Syntactic Structures. Also provided is an extensive description of the expression of modality and related categories in Modern Japanese.

Mood, modality and evidentiality are popular and dynamic areas in linguistics. Re-assessing Modalising Expressions - Categories, co-text, and context focuses on the specific issue of the ways language users express permission, obligation, volition (intention), possibility and ability, necessity and prediction linguistically.

The emotional aspects of language have so far not received the attention they deserve. This study focuses on nonpropositional, i.e. expressive and interactional meanings of Japanese signs, with special emphasis on understanding their cognitive, psychological and social meanings. It shows how the Japanese language is richly endowed to express personal voice and emotive nuances, and confronts the theoretical issues related to this. The author proposes a new theoretical framework for Discourse Modality, a primary concern for Japanese speakers, to analyze the 'expressiveness' of language.

This study examines the interaction of the Japanese modal auxiliary daroo with different sentence types and intonation. A detailed investigation of daroo reveals an interesting paradigm with respect to parameters such as clause type, boundary tone, tier of meaning and pragmatic context. I propose that daroo is a use-conditional speech act operator which asserts the epistemic knowledge of the speaker. The proposal is formally implemented in the framework of inquisitive epistemic logic. That is, daroo marks an assertion of an entertain modality. A rising intonational contour is analyzed as a prosodic morpheme that is paratactically associated to its host and functions as a use-conditional question operator that renders a truth-conditional declarative into a use-condition of question act. A new composition rule that indicates how to interpret paratactically associated use-conditional items is also proposed.

Forms of evidence as a subcategory of modality have yet to receive particular attention in Indonesian linguistics studies. Researchers do not give a distinct classification to the modality subcategory of the form of the marker, which has a distinctive characteristic. It means that the public’s expression of Indonesian language modalities in lexical patterns for both oral and written is not observable. Moreover, it is different from languages like Japanese with grammatical construction. Other research has identified the equivalent of evidential forms in Japanese in Indonesian and found a unique use of the term’s appearances, taste, function, and meaning the evidential. The Malay language has contributed to the Indonesian language and must have a distinctive form of evidence. It is commonly caused by many unexpected attitudes of the speaker when conveying a proposition (state of the matter or events). However, this study investigates the form, function, and meaning of evidential modalities in Kampar Malay dialects in Riau Province, Indonesia. The Kampar Malay dialect is one of the subdialects of the Malay language in Riau. This study refers to Narrog’s concept of pure evidence, where the speakers’ attitudes do not contain elements of inference (allegations) and inferential evidence that the speaker can distance himself from consideration, at least partially, with doubts of doubt. The data was obtained from native speakers through interviews. Furthermore, the markers of modality evidence were analyzed for syntactic behavior by the distribution method. Based on the analysis results, in Kampar Malay dialect, it was revealed that the revealer of pure evidence was not marked, while inferential evidence was marked by the use of sobuik, condoe, dongow cito, dongaw-dongaw cito, keceknyo, gakde, ndak kan lai, aso den, aso-aso, nampak, nampaknyo, nampak e, nampak a , and nampak-nampak .

Modifying and hedging one’s claims appropriately is an important characteristic of academic writing. This study focuses on the three main English modal verbs used to express “epistemic possibility” to avoid making strong statements, viz., , , and . The purpose of this corpus-based study is to explore modal verb usage by Japanese EFL undergraduate students and consider pedagogical implications of our findings. Our analysis suggests that the Japanese students’ use of these modal verbs, especially , has a tendency to be informal and insufficiently academic. While the Japanese students use very frequently, they do not use it sufficiently in the sense of “epistemic possibility”, and some of their use is inappropriate not just in academic English but in English more generally. The observed high frequency of  may be related to topics and may also be due to the influence of L1. We discuss different factors that may explain the findings, based mainly on the overview of factors impacting on EFL learners’ use of academic English offered by Gilquin and Paquot (2008). Too chatty: Learner academic writing and register variation. English Text Construction 1(1). 41–61), suggest several additions to this overview, and discuss implications for the instruction of these modal verbs in academic writing and in order to improve relevant teaching materials.

This paper examines how gesturers and signers use their bodies to express concepts such as instrumentality and humanness. Comparing across eight sign languages (American, Japanese, German, Israeli, and Kenyan Sign Languages, Ha Noi Sign Language of Vietnam, Central Taurus Sign Language of Turkey, and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language of Israel) and the gestures of American non-signers, we find recurring patterns for naming entities in three semantic categories (tools, animals, and fruits & vegetables). These recurring patterns are captured in a classification system that identifies iconic strategies based on how the body is used together with the hands. Across all groups, tools are named with manipulation forms, where the head and torso represent those of a human agent. Animals tend to be identified with personification forms, where the body serves as a map for a comparable non-human body. Fruits & vegetables tend to be identified with object forms, where the hands act independently from the rest of the body to represent static features of the referent. We argue that these iconic patterns are rooted in using the body for communication, and provide a basis for understanding how meaningful communication emerges quickly in gesture and persists in emergent and established sign languages.

Iconicity is when linguistic units are perceived as ‘sounding like what they mean,’ so that phonological structure of an iconic word is what begets its meaning through perceived imitation, rather than an arbitrary semantic link. Fundamental examples are onomatopoeia, e.g., dog’s barking: woof woof (English), wou wou (Cantonese), wan wan (Japanese), hau hau (Polish). Systematicity is often conflated with iconicity because it is also a phenomenon whereby a word begets its meaning from phonological structure, albeit through (arbitrary) statistical relationships, as opposed to perceived imitation. One example is gl- (Germanic languages), where speakers can intuit the meaning ‘light’ via knowledge of similar words, e.g., glisten, glint, glow, gleam, glimmer. This conflation of iconicity and systematicity arises from questions like ‘How can we differentiate or qualify perceived imitation from (arbitrary) statistical relationships?’ So far there is no proposal to answer this question. By drawing observations from the visual modality, this paper mediates ambiguity between iconicity and systematicity in spoken language by proposing a methodology which explains how iconicity is achieved through perceptuo-motor analogies derived from oral articulatory gesture. We propose that universal accessibility of articulatory gestures, and human ability to create (perceptuo-motor) analogy, is what in turn makes iconicity universal and thus easily learnable by speakers regardless of language background, as studies have shown. Conversely, our methodology allows one to argue which words are devoid of iconicity seeing as such words should not be explainable in terms of articulatory gesture. We use ideophones from Chaoyang (Southern Min) to illustrate our methodology.

This paper argues that some words are so highly charged with meaning by a community that they may prevent a discussion during which each participant is on an equal footing. These words are indeed either unanimously accepted or rejected. The presence of these adjectival groups pushes the antagonist to find rhetorical strategies to circumvent them. The main idea we want to develop is that some propositions are not easily debatable in context because of some specific value-bearing words (VBWs), and one of the goals of this paper is to build a methodological tool for finding and classifying these VBWs (with a focus on evaluative adjectives). Our study echoes the importance of “cultural keywords” (as reported by Wierzbicka, Understanding cultures through their key words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese, 1997) in argument (as reported by Rigotti & Rocci, Argumentation in practice, 2005), but is rather based on a German approach developed by (as reported by Dieckmann, Sprache in der Politik: Einführung in die Pragmatik und Semantik der politischen, 1975), (as reported by Strauss and Zifonun, Der politische Wortschatz, 1986), and (as reported by Girnth, Sprache und Sprachverwendung in der Politik: Eine Einführung in die linguistische Analyse öffentlich-politischer Kommunikation, 2015) about “Miranda” and “Anti-Miranda” words that is expanded and refined here. In particular, our study tries to understand why some statements, fueled by appreciative (Tseronis, 2014) or evaluative adjectives, have such rhetorical effects on a pragmatic level in the particular context of a vote on the Swiss popular initiative called “for more affordable housing”. This context is fruitful since two parties offer reasons for two opposing policy claims: namely, to accept or to reject an initiative. When one party uses arguments containing such universally unassailable adjectival groups to defend a “yes” vote (in our example, pleading for more affordable housing rents), the opposing party cannot use a symmetrical antonym while pleading for the “no” vote. The methodological tool that is proposed here could shed light on the use of certain rhetorical and referential strategies in conflicting policy proposition contexts.