Summary Details
| Query: |
Final Supplement - 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: |
Query for this Summary posted Jan. 25, 2011 in LINGUIST Issue
22.438: http://linguistlist.org/issues/22/22-438.html Since my summary of responses (LINGUIST List 22.739, Feb. 13, found here: http://linguistlist.org/issues/22/22-739.html) to my query (22.438) about expressions for 'sometimes' being used for possibility ('maybe'), I have received additional responses that I believe merit this supplementary posting: First, my thanks to Johan van der Auwera, Bittor Hidalgo, Torsten Leuschner, Liliane Haegeman, Martin Mangei, and Joanna Zaleska for their responses. Hidalgo reported that while 'sometimes' is not used for 'maybe' in Basque, an expression for 'somewhere' is used for 'maybe' and even stronger possibility, represented by English 'probably' and 'apparently'. Zaleska and Van der Auwera gave the common use of Polish czasem 'sometimes' in the sense of 'maybe', at least in polar interrogatives. Zaleska cited a Polish-English dictionary giving "1. sometimes; now and then" and "by any chance" as two senses of czasem. Examples for the second include a polar interrogative, but also a warning reminder: nie zgub czasem tych pieniędzy 'mind (or be careful) you don't lose that money'. Van der Auwera sent me his "From temporal adverb to modal particle - Some comparative remarks on Polish 'czasem'", Papers and studies in contrastive linguistics, 18.91-99 (1984), to which I refer interested readers for many of the points in the suggested explanations I have received, as well as further data (including Ukrainian) and discussion. Leuschner and Haegeman provided additional examples of Dutch and Flemish soms 'sometimes' used to express possibility, with helpful details of its limitation to conditionals and certain types of interrogatives, as well as of interspeaker variation. Leuschner described the function of soms as most of all the pragmatic one of mitigation or hedging. Finally, Mangei suggested a parallel with known extension of deontic modals to epistemic uses: thus analogous to 'he is allowed to do that -> maybe he's doing it (now)' and 'he is obligated to do it -> probably/certainly he is doing it (now)', there might be a similar implication 'sometimes he does it' -> 'maybe he's doing it (now)'. George Huttar |
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| LL Issue: | 22.1768 | |
| Date Posted: | 20-Apr-2011 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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