Summary Details
| Query: |
Semantics: Sometimes vs. Maybe
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| Author: | George Huttar | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Semantics
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| Summary: |
First, my thanks to the following for their quick and helpful replies to my
inquiry of (LINGUIST List 22-438. Tue Jan 25, 2011) about languages that "use an expression meaning 'sometimes' to express possibility": Erin Tavano William J. Sullivan Eduard Werner Bruce Despain Jose Luis Guijarro Morales Sophia A. Malamud Michael Swan James Essegbey Greg Shenaut With regard to the distribution of the phenomenon, their responses together suggest that it may be fairly widespread in Germanic and Romance languages and languages that have been in contact with such, but not necessarily elsewhere: The use of 'sometimes' in the sense of 'maybe' is not found in Slavic languages. Germanic: Eduard Werner reports that in some Saxon dialects of German, near Leipzig, manchmal 'sometimes' is used for Standard German (SG) vielleicht 'maybe' in a pragmatic context exemplified by Wissen Sie manchmal... 'do you perhaps know...?', a source of amusement among SG speakers. One respondent called my attention to English 'it depends' as an expression that serves for both senses (e.g., A: Can you grow corn here? B: It depends.) Romance: Spanish shows some overlap, via the noun vez, in "a veces" 'sometimes' and "talvez" 'maybe'; the respondent suggests, "My intuition is that in 'a veces' we are implying that this and that may happen a certain set of times, while with 'talvez' we are pointing to the fact that at one time this and that might happen (but not at other times)." "French 'des fois (que)', literally 'sometimes', is used to mean something like 'supposing' or 'in the case that' or 'could be'". Other: "in Ghanaian Pidgin English ... 'sometime' is used both for 'sometimes' and 'maybe'". With regard to a rationale for the use of one expression with both 'sometimes' and 'maybe' senses, one respondent pointed out that sometimes and maybe both function as existential quantifiers, differing only in whether their domain of application is times/events or possible worlds, respectively. (See de Swart, Henriëtte: 1991. Adverbs of Quantification: A Generalized Quantifier Approach. Ph.D. Dissertation, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen; and various works on modality by Angelika Kratzer.) Empirical data from English word association are provided by Erin Tavano's doctoral work. She reports, "According to the U[niversity of] S[outh] F[lorida] free association norms, 'maybe' is a strong associate of 'sometimes', in English. That is, when people hear 'sometimes' and are asked to respond with the first word that comes to mind, they often say 'maybe'. It is the second most common response, the first being 'always'". Link to the association data at: http://w3.usf.edu/FreeAssociation/AppendixA/Cue_Target_Pairs.S And Llnk to background on the USF database at: http://w3.usf.edu/FreeAssociation/ Finally, the extension of meaning is not always from temporal to possible: literature on the cartography of adverbials was mentioned, according to which "in English the modal and temporal are ranked opposite to the ranking of some other languages. Hence, where one language can generalize on the temporal 'sometimes' and use the same word for the modal meaning of both, another will generalize on the modal adverb and use it for both". Sometimes I'll write an article on 'sometimes' and 'maybe' some day! George Huttar Editor's Note: A second supplement Summary was submitted by George Huttar April 20, 2011 as LINGUIST Issue 22.1768 "Final Supplement - Semantics: Sometimes vs. Maybe". It can be viewed here: http://linguistlist.org/issues/22/22-1768.html |
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| LL Issue: | 22.739 | |
| Date Posted: | 13-Feb-2011 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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