Forthcoming: Apprehensional constructions in a cross-linguistic perspective

Martina Faller (ed), Marine Vuillermet (ed), Eva Schultze-Berndt (ed)

Synopsis

The functional domain of apprehensionality encompasses grammatical markers or constructions which conventionally encode or pragmatically implicate that the situation described by the clause is an undesirable possibility. Its main manifestations discussed in this volume are (i) apprehensives, which are modal markers which can occur in main clauses, and thus could serve to translate English might in Don't go near this dog, it might bite (but also add a component of undesirability), and (ii) precautionary subordinators such as English lest in Don't go near this dog, lest it bite. As just illustrated, such elements tend to occur in warnings and are often but not necessarily accompanied by an instruction as to how to avoid the undesirable situation. Although wide-spread cross-linguistically, they have received very little attention in the linguistic literature and their discussion has been mostly restricted to brief sections in language-specific discussions of some lesser studied languages. This volume addresses this gap by presenting in-depth discussions of apprehensional markers in individual languages (and in some contributions, language groups), by experts on these languages and based on first-hand data. The editors' introduction offers a review of the existing literature, including of the varied terminology used and of the main research questions arising. The individual papers present detailed investigations of the semantic and pragmatic properties of the construction(s) in question, their syntactic status, and in many cases also their diachrony. The final contribution is a questionnaire for the in-depth exploration of variation within apprehensional constructions. The volume is aimed at typologists, semanticists interested in modality, and general linguists.

Chapters

  • Introduction
    Apprehensional constructions in a cross-linguistic perspective
    Marine Vuillermet, Eva Schultze-Berndt, Martina Faller
  • Speaking and acting with care
    The grammar of circumspection in Upper Tanana Dene
    Olga Lovick
  • The apprehensional domain in A’ingae (Cofán)
    Maksymilian Dąbkowski, Scott AnderBois
  • The Apprehensional construction in Gban
    Maksim Fedotov
  • The apprehensive in Kambaata (Cushitic)
    Form, meaning and origin
    Yvonne Treis
  • Apprehension in Hebrew
    Itamar Francez
  • Two major apprehensional strategies in Slavic
    A survey of their areal and grammatical distribution
    Björn Wiemer
  • Apprehensives in East Caucasian
    Michael Daniel, Nina Dobrushina
  • Inauspicious events and their outcomes in Thulung
    Aimée Lahaussois
  • The apprehensive function of a final enclitic particle in Baoding (Sinitic)
    Na Song
  • Apprehensional markers in Korean
    Seongha Rhee, Tania Kuteva
  • Explicit apprehensions, implicit instructions
    An indirect speech act in the grammar
    Alexandre François
  • The grammatical realisation of apprehensional functions in Ngumpin-Yapa languages (Australia)
    Mitchell Browne, Thomas Ennever, David Osgarby
  • A fieldwork questionnaire on apprehensionals
    Marine Vuillermet

Biographies

Martina Faller

Martina Faller is a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester (UK). She has a long-standing research interest in the semantics-pragmatics interface from a cross-linguistic perspective. She has made major contributions to the study of evidentiality, including its relation to modality based on original fieldwork on Cuzco Quechua (Peru), and developed a speech act account of evidentials in this language. She has also published on quantification, pluractionality and the multifunctionality of alternative-sensitive particles.

Marine Vuillermet

Marine Vuillermet has worked with the Ese Ejja people (Tacanan, Bolivia) since 2005, and has written a grammar of the language. Her study of the language has led her to especially investigate apprehensionality from a typological perspective. She has also published on other semantic and syntactic aspects of Ese Ejja, and on the typology of spatial expressions, and she is one of the editors of the Areal Typology of Languages of the Americas (ATLAs) database.

Eva Schultze-Berndt

Eva Schultze-Berndt is a professor of linguistics at the University of Manchester (UK). Her research interests include complex and secondary predication, part of speech systems, information structure, differential argument marking, epistemic authority, and language contact. She has conducted extensive fieldwork on the Australian languages Jaminjung-Ngaliwurru (Mirndi), and to a lesser extent Ngarinyman (Ngumpin-Yapa) and Kriol. Her interest in modality stems from observing the diversity of modal systems, specifically the diverse strategies of apprehensional marking, in Australian languages.

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Published

June 19, 2025
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Research on Comparative Grammar

Online ISSN

2749-781X

Print ISSN

2749-7801
Cite as
Faller, Martina, Vuillermet, Marine & Schultze-Berndt, Eva (eds.). Forthcoming. Apprehensional constructions in a cross-linguistic perspective. (Research on Comparative Grammar). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Copyright (c) 2025 Martina Faller, Marine Vuillermet, Eva Schultze-Berndt; Olga Lovick, Maksymilian Dąbkowski, Scott AnderBois, Maksim Fedotov, Yvonne Treis, Itamar Francez, Björn Wiemer, Michael Daniel, Nina Dobrushina, Aimée Lahaussois, Na Song, Seongha Rhee, Tania Kuteva, Alexandre François, Mitchell Browne, Thomas Ennever, David Osgarby

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.