Project

A diachronic corpus-based study of particularizing focus particles in English

Code
01P02010
Duration
01 October 2010 → 30 September 2014
Funding
Regional and community funding: Special Research Fund
Research disciplines
  • Humanities and the arts
    • Language studies
    • Linguistics
    • Literary studies
    • Theory and methodology of linguistics
    • Other languages and literary studies
Keywords
grammaticalization pragmatics historical linguistics English
 
Project description

The proposed study aims to examine a selection of particularizing focus adverbs (e.g. mainly, mostly, in particular, at least) from a historical perspective. More specifically, the forms' semantic-pragmatic and syntactic developments will be interpreted within a broader frame of theories of grammaticalization and (inter)subjectification, on the basis of a detailed corpus analysis.