Prepositional Word Combinations with modal meaning
Monika Hornacek Banasova
DOI: 10.18355/XL.2018.11.03.05
Abstract
Common Word Combinations vary considerably in terms of structure and meaning. This article is focused on the area of lexical-syntagmatic combinations of Common Word Combinations with functional words. The article also deals with a kind of Common Word Combinations that up to present day has been rather neglected: binary combinations of prepositions and noun. Out of all the possible syntactical positions of the combination between prepositions and nouns, the ones being used as adverbials with modal meaning on the epistemic level were selected. The reason for this being their formal and content-related qualities and the fact that they can be counted as regular ways to express modality which have not received too much attention so far. The empirical analysis of Common Word Combinations is based on methods of Corpus Linguistics and offers verified results concerning usage, possible collocations, variations of meaning and possible equivalents of German preposition-noun-connections in contrastive comparison to Slovak.
Key words: common word combinations, set prepositional expressions, means of expressing modality, Corpus Linguistics, epistemic modality