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Part of
Modality and Diachronic Construction Grammar
Edited by Martin Hilpert, Bert Cappelle and Ilse Depraetere
[Constructional Approaches to Language 32] 2021
► pp. 149–184

Unfolding constructions

Postmodal auxiliaries in mirative complement patterns

| Université de Caen Normandie, CRISCO EA 4255
This paper explores the semantic motivation of postmodal auxiliaries in complement constructions conveying mirativity in French and Finnish. French pouvoir ‘can’ and Finnish pitää ‘should’ both occur as postmodal markers in complements of epistemic and axiological items. These constructions refer to events that deviate from what is discursively projected as expected. As a modal verb of possibility, pouvoir profiles the meaning ‘p and not ¬p’, which is based on an opposition, while pitää, originally a necessity verb, gives prominence to the paradigmatic meaning ’p instead of q1, q2 …’. While the two verbs function in a similar manner as indexes of an interclausal semantic link in mirative constructions, the meaning of unexpectedness is not construed in the same way, and the critical contexts in the evolution of postmodal complement patterns with pouvoir and pitää are of a different type.
Keywords: postmodality, procedural meaning, grammaticalization, complement constructions, modal verbs, subjunctives, mirativity, affect, French, Finnish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Objectives of the study
    • 1.2Data
  • 2.Postmodality and mental accessing of complements
    • 2.1The modal and postmodal semantics of pouvoir and pitää
    • 2.2Interclausal chains
  • 3.Interplay with the lexical semantics of the matrix
    • 3.1 Pouvoir pm and pitää pm as markers of going-beyond-epistemic-limits
    • 3.2 Pouvoir pm and pitää pm as markers of going-beyond-axiological-limits
  • 4.Procedural meaning and interclausal cohesion
    • 4.1From modal possibility and necessity to postmodal asymmetrical relationships
    • 4.2The evolution of pouvoir pm and pitää pm as relational strategies
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • The data collections used
  • References
Published online: 12 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.32.06pel
References (79)
The data collections used
DMA = Digital Morphology Archives [text corpus]. University of Helsinki, The Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies (2003). Kielipankki. Retrieved from [URL]
FLC = Finnish Literary Classics, Kielipankki Version [text corpus]. Institute for the Languages of Finland (2016). Kielipankki. Retrieved from [URL]
FRANTEXT Intégral. [URL]
The Finnish Gutenberg Corpus [text corpus]. Gutenberg Project (2014). Kielipankki. Retrieved from [URL]
SA = The Finnish Dialect Syntax Archive’s Helsinki Korp Version [text corpus]. University of Turku, School of Languages and Translation Studies, & Institute for the Languages of Finland (1985). Kielipankki. Retrieved from [URL]
The Suomi 24 2001–2014 (Sample) Corpus, Helsinki Korp Version [text corpus]. Aller Media ltd. (2014). Kielipankki. Retrieved from [URL]
VKK = Corpus of Old Literary Finnish [text corpus]. Institute for the Languages of Finland (2013). Kielipankki. Retrieved from [URL]
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