Adverbs as a word class are notoriously difficult to define. The volume deals with the delimitation of this category, its internal structure, the morphological make-up of adverbs and their positions in syntactic structures. A closer look at diachronic developments sheds light on the characteristics of adverbial word-formation. Taking into account adverbs in German, English, Dutch, French and Italian, the contributions to this volume provide new insights into the characteristics of this heterogeneous and multi-faceted category and will be of interest to linguists working in the fields of morphology, syntax and language change.
The book revisits the notion of deontic modality from the perspective of an understudied category in the modal domain, viz. adjectives. It analyses extraposition constructions with English adjectives like essential and appropriate, and uses this to refine traditional definitions of deontic modality. Together with dynamic and evaluative meanings, this category is integrated into a conceptual map, for which diachronic and synchronic evidence is adduced.
Category mistakes are sentences such as "Green ideas sleep furiously," "Saturday is in bed," and "The theory of relativity is eating breakfast." Such sentences strike most speakers as highly infelicitous but it is a challenge to explain precisely why they are so. Ofra Magidor addresses this challenge, while providing a comprehensive discussion of the various treatments of category mistakes in both philosophy and linguistics.
Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre
In Shakespearean studies, the category of the festive has been applied by critics only to the comedies. In this groundbreaking and provocative work, Naomi Conn Liebler introduces the category of festive tragedy. Shakespearean tragedy is, she argues, a celebration of communal survival, demonstrating what happens when a community violates or neglects the ritual structures that define and preserve it