The Expressivity of Grammar (Beitrage Zur Kommunikationsgeschichte)

This study investigates the way in which the speaker's attitude to what is said is implicitly coded in grammar. Using a wealth of material from earlier stages of English as well as present-day English, the author sheds new light on a set of six grammatical constructions, a subset of which belongs to the most important and most widely investigated grammatical phenomena. culture-specific and universal factors.