Mirative and Focusing Uses of the Catalan Particle pla *
Mirative and Focusing Uses of the Catalan Particle pla *
This chapter presents different types of pla in Catalan. In its basic use, pla coappears with some certain quantifiers to act as an epistemic modality adverb. In addition to modifying quantifiers, pla can act as a focal marker. It argues that this role of pla comes from its basic meaning as an epistemic modal adverb, which allows it to focalize a sentential constituent in order either to “overpass” implicitly a situation expressed in the preceding discourse or deny it. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the properties of pla acting as a ponderative quantifier, which gives to the sentence a mirative meaning (pla1 ). Section 3 studies the use of pla as a focus element related with the negative meaning of the sentence (pla2 ). Section 4 deals with the emphatic role of pla in reinforcing a bare quantifier (pla3 ). Finally, Section 5 emphasizes the idea that the three types of pla have a common function: their role of focus markers. More specifically, they are different instances of a quantifier that can be engaged in different functional positions thereby realizing different features.
Keywords: Catalan, pla, epistemic modal adverb, focal marker, ponderative quantifier, focus element, negative meaning, emphatic role
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
