Richard Matthews Knihy

Exploring both internal and external landscapes, Richard Matthews' debut poetry collection showcases a remarkable range of voices and modes. His work delves into complex themes, such as depression in "Cavafy Suite," while also celebrating life through music and love in pieces like "Of Mere Virtuosity" and "Cloister." With vivid imagery, he conjures fantastical elements, from dragons in medieval France to transformative art. The collection balances emotional depth with intellectual engagement, offering a unique and powerful reading experience.

Modality is a subject that has attracted increasing attention over the last decade or so. In English, and to a lesser extent in German, there is a class of syntactically restricted auxiliary verbs that is primarily associated with modal concepts. Following on from work presented in his Edinburgh PhD-thesis and suggestions made in Lyons' Semantics (1977), the author discusses the differences between modal logic and linguistic modality, and then examines what kind of verbal expression, whether auxiliary or not, can reflect the various modality parameters. A chapter each is devoted to epistemic, «logical», deontic, dynamic-dispositional, and bouletic modality, and to how modality interacts with sentence type. The discussion mainly concerns English, but with a number of side-glances at German. In a final chapter, the author sets up semantic specifications for the modal auxiliaries in the light of his findings in previous chapters.

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 .