Schwaiger, Thomas, Elnora Ten Wolde & Evelien Keizer (Eds.) Modification in Functional Discourse Grammar. Special Issue in Open Linguistics 8(1): 2022.
In this issue, modification is understood in a narrow sense in that modifiers are viewed as lexical elements of different types and degrees of complexity (e.g. adjectives, adverbs, clauses, etc.) commenting on/scoping over a particular pragmatic or semantic unit of analysis. Over the last fifteen years, modification has become an area of renewed interest, dealt with in several in edited volumes and monograph-length works. Different aspects of modification have also been addressed in Functional Discourse Grammar, such as particular kinds and developments of modifiers in individual languages (e.g. García Velasco 2013; Keizer 2018; Van de Velde 2009), modification on different levels and layers (e.g. Keizer 2019; Rijkhoff 2008, 2014; Van de Velde 2007, 2012) or the typology of the modifier-argument opposition (van Rijn 2017), as of yet, this topic has not been addressed comprehensively in the theory and many open questions still remain.
The aim of the current collection of papers is to address some of these issues and to offer new analyses of a range of modifiers at the clausal and phrasal level. Two of the articles articles are concerned with premodification within the noun phrase (one addressing the role of the general notion of compositionality, the second focusing on NPs with prenominal adjectives); two other articles provide detailed analyses of groups of adverbs (evidential adverbs within the noun phrase, illocutionary adverbs at the clausal level). Another group of articles offers (synchronic) accounts of various constructionalized modifiers (degree modifiers, comparative constructions and insubordinate if-constructions). The final two papers offer diachronic accounts of (grammaticalizing/grammaticalized and lexicalized) elements (the development and union of English just and so, the development of the reportative adverb dizque in American Spanish).
Dr. Elnora ten Wolde is a post-doc researcher at the Institute of English Studies, University of Graz, Austria
Dr. Thomas Schwaiger is a post-doc researcher at the Institute of Linguistics, University of Graz, Austria
Prof. Dr. Evelien Keizer is a professor at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna, Austria
