Papers on Semantics and Grammar

The six revised papers collected here - two have been translated into English - address in their different ways questions relating to grammatical meaning (both semantics and pragmatics) and the analysis of constructions. Though they cover a period of about 10 years, they can be said to share a view of linguistic analysis that is holistic rather than modular and descriptive rather than generative. The topics discussed are: the semantics and pragmatics of get-passives; the semantics of epistemic modality; the status, function and analysis of participial and gerundial -ing constructions; four controversies in the analysis of modality and modal auxiliaries; the functional classification of adverbials and the pragmatics of their position; the semantics and pragmatics of prepositional phrases with for.