Publisher's Synopsis
The articles collected in this volume deal with theoretical and empirical issues in the historical semantics of German modals. The topics presented in these articles include types of semantic change, the semantics/pragmatics interface, the structure and development of polysemy, epistemic and non-epistemic uses, variation of use in different types of text, aspects of quantitative corpus analysis. As for empirical data there is a particular emphasis of Old High German and Early Modern German materials.
