Modes of Modality: Modality, typology, and universal grammar

519 Pages·2014·4.63 MB·English

by  Elisabeth Leiss

Modes of Modality
Studies in Language Companion Series (SLCS)
This series has been established as a companion series to the periodical
Studies in Language.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
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Editors
Werner Abraham Elly van Gelderen
University of Vienna / Arizona State University
University of Munich
Editorial Board
Bernard Comrie Christian Lehmann
Max Planck Institute, Leipzig University of Erfurt
and University of California, Santa Barbara
Marianne Mithun
William Croft University of California, Santa Barbara
University of New Mexico
Heiko Narrog
Östen Dahl Tohuku University
University of Stockholm
Johanna L. Wood
Gerrit J. Dimmendaal University of Aarhus
University of Cologne
Debra Ziegeler
Ekkehard König University of Paris III
Free University of Berlin
Volume 149
Modes of Modality. Modality, typology, and universal grammar
Edited by Elisabeth Leiss and Werner Abraham
Modes of Modality
Modality, typology, and universal grammar
Edited by
Elisabeth Leiss
University of Munich
Werner Abraham
University of Vienna
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Modes of modality : modality, typology, and universal grammar / Edited by Elisabeth
Leiss and Werner Abraham.
p. cm. (Studies in Language Companion Series, issn 0165-7763 ; v. 149)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Modality (Linguistics) 2. Grammar, Comparative and general--Mood. 3. Grammar,
Comparative and general--Tense. 4. Cognitive grammar. 5. Typology (Linguis-
tics) 6. Linguistic universals. I. Leiss, Elisabeth, editor of compilation.
II. Abraham, Werner, editor of compilation.
P299.M6M654 2014
415’.6--dc23 2013041819
isbn 978 90 272 0616 9 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7079 5 (Eb)
© 2014 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Introduction 1
Elisabeth Leiss & Werner Abraham
part i. Formal properties of modality
Interpreting modals by phase heads 19
Daigo Akiba
Evidentiality straddling T- and C-domains 43
Nadia Varley
part ii. Typological surveys
The syntax of modal polyfunctionality revisited:
Evidence from the languages of Europe 89
Björn Hansen
Mora da as a marker of modal meanings in Macedonian:
On correlations between categorial restrictions
and morphosyntactic behaviour 127
Björn Wiemer
Modal semantics and morphosyntax of the Latvian DEBITIVE 167
Ilze Lokmane & Andra Kalnača
Deontic or epistemic? habēre as a modal marker of future
certainty in Macedonian 193
Liljana Mitkovska & Eleni Bužarovska
Epistemic, evidential and attitudinal markers in clause-medial
position in Cantonese 219
Foong Ha Yap & Winnie Oi-Wan Chor
part iii. Interfaces between mood and modality
Modal particles in rationale clauses and related constructions 263
Patrick Grosz
Modal particles in causal clauses: The case of German weil wohl 291
Mathias Schenner & Frank Sode
i Modes of Modality. Modality, Typology, and Universal Grammar
part i. Modality conceptualizations
Enablement and possibility 319
Raphael Salkie
The modal category of sufficiency 353
Chantal Melis
part . Diachronic derivation
From agent-oriented modality to sequential: The polysemy
of the marker ni in Kakabe (Mande) 379
Alexandra Vydrina
part i. Covert modality
A rare case of covert modality: Spoken Polish and the novel
periphrastic past with mieć ‘have’ 409
Werner Abraham & Jadwiga Piskorz
(C)Overt epistemic modality and its perspectival
effects on the textual surface 457
Sonja Zeman
Dimensions of implicit modality in Igbo 485
Chinedu Uchechukwu
Index 507
Introduction
Elisabeth Leiss & Werner Abraham
University of Munich and University of Vienna / University of Munich
1. General background
In Cartesian approaches to Universal Grammar, language is reduced to a formal,
axiomatic system: content (and functions) are attributed to human-specific thought,
while the formal side is attributed to language, which is treated as devoid of content
of its own.1 In sharp contrast to this Cartesian approach to language, Un-Cartesian
Linguistics analyses how lan guage creates the human mind. With respect to this mind-
creating capacity of human language, grammatical categories are one of the core topics
in this alternative approach to Universal Grammar and cross-linguistic research into
language. As modality appears to be one of the major tools to create intersubjectivity
and objectivity as well as meta-linguistic capacities and a Theory of Mind (alignment
with, or challenge of, other minds), we chose this category as the most representative
one of the “modes of signifying” or “modi significandi”, a concept that is related to the
first scientific and universal approach to language in the late Middle Ages.
In contrast to current Universalist approaches, there existed once a non-Cartesian
approach to Universal Grammar designed in the late Middle Ages by the so-called
Modis tae (cf. Leiss [2009]2012). In this approach humans and human-specific cogni-
tion are defined as driven by language, which comes very close to the stance taken
by Bickerton (1990), who defines human-specific cognition as animal cognition plus
language. Bickerton’s defi nition of language is often rejected as being too radical an
approach. However, we should keep in mind that this definition of the relationship
between language and the human mind has been common ground since Aristotle,
at least before the rise of Cartesian rationalism, which transformed rationalism in an
essential way. According to this approach, language is invested with a range of func-
tions that are completely absent in animal communication, one of them being, by the
way, the functions of modality, which are found nowhere in animal communication.
1. We have profited from Ralf Salkie’s very careful input. Eleni Bužarovska helped avoid
many a mistake.
2 Elisabeth Leiss & Werner Abraham
Yet, the emphasis is on function, a notion broadly avoided in today’s Cartesian Lin-
guistics, but in the center and focus of Un-Cartesian Uni versal Grammar. The function
of language in Un-Car te sian Linguistics is to translate reality as perceived by indi-
vidual human beings into a thought system that is formatted by language in a way that
allows for intersub jective communication of individual experience. The Un-C artesian
approach to Universal Grammar is a functionalist approach to language insofar as
it pro vides a clear demarcation line be tween grammar and the lexicon (in terms of
grammatical semantics as opposed to lexical seman tics). Within this functional
account, there is no way to include irregular grammatical material in the lexicon. Thus,
according to the Un-Cartesian approach of UG, lexical and grammatical representa-
tions of grammatical functions (functional categories) such as modality can never be
considered to be equivalent.
In what follows we discuss both the background and the contents of the five main
thematic ally different chapters as they have been treated in the present c ollection.
Needless to say, the top ics in our chapter divisions overlap to a certain, occasionally
even large, degree. Nevertheless, each of the introductions, subchapters 2–6, will sketch
the background to the topics treated in this book. A recent comprehensive introduc-
tion to modality can be found in Abraham and Leiss (eds) 2012b.
2. Formal properties of root vs. epistemic and evidential modality
Modality, as treated in the present collection, goes beyond morphological mood in
treating il loc u tionary categories: modal verbs/MVs as in Germanic and treated in so
prominent and path-breaking ways by Kratzer (ever since 1984) as well as modal par-
ticles/MPs as richly and characteristically represented also in Germanic (except for
MStE). Why, for example, English, by contrast to German and all other Germanic
languages, does not exhibit MPs will not be dealt with in this volume (see van
Gelderen 2001).
These are the main topics discussed in the recent literature: How is modality,
realized as modal verbs and modal particles, implementable in terms of Minimal-
ist phase-edge theory? How are epistemic readings and evidential readings of modal
verbs – note: not as adverbial lexicals – implementable and distinguished in modern
syntax? Is there an epistemic syntax lower than CP – i.e. in vP? What is the phase-edge
and the illocutionary-force status of the Germanic/Slavic modal particles as opposed
to the clause-end particles in the South-East Asian languages? Are modal verbs indeed
without content as are auxiliaries like theta-role-less have and be (Chomsky 2008)?
And, finally, if DP indeed is also phase- and edge-worthy (as suggested, among others,
by Svenonius 2003), do DPs carry modality characteristics? From these six topics, this
book addresses the first three. akiba, in Modal Interpretation by Phase, suggests that
Introduction 3
epistemic and root modal mean ings are indeed interpreted by phase heads ( Chomsky
2000, 2001). He joins Abraham (1989a,b, 1991, 2002) in claiming that the reason
why modal auxiliaries have at most two interpretations is due to the assump tion that
they are merged in two types of phase heads, C and v. Root modals are interpreted in
the vP phase and epistemic modals in the CP phase (cf. also Butler 2003). The same
holds for Japanese: Modal auxiliaries are base-generated at the phase-head positions.
By contrast, in English, a modal auxiliary, which is overtly in the T-head position,
just carries a modal feature which is in an Agree relation with a phase head. Further-
more, a modal feature on a phase head adds the information ab out how possible or
necess ary the information transferred to the semantic component is when syntactic
objects are transferred to the semantic components phase-by-phase as suggested by
Chomsky (2004). In other words, root mo dals affect the properties of the predicate,
while epistemic modals cannot in that their force ranges over the entire clause. Since
modal meanings are interpreted by phase heads, modal auxiliaries themselves have no
seman tic effect at the sem antic component and are able to undergo “head movement”
to a T-head position at the phonological component. Thus, modal auxiliaries are
semantically vacuous as are auxiliaries like have and be. The movement that auxiliaries
and modals undergo may be caused for phonological reasons as Chomsky (2001: 37)
claims that head movement should “fall within the phonological component.”
By contrast to the syntactic approach followed by Akiba, varley argues in
Evidentiality straddling T- and C-domains that the overt evidential morphology as
perceived in Bulgarian can provide us with a clue regarding the complexities of a
universally underlying structure. Importantly, this contribution takes only gram-
maticalised evidentiality into account, since lexical evidentiality has quite different
distributional properties (cf. Leiss 2012). The analysis is formulated in terms of a Rizzi
(1997)-style approach towards split CP. CP-functional heads are shown to interact
with TP-f unctional material, namely Tense/Person/Aspect/Mood. In the process of
this complex interaction, TP-material is mapped onto designated functional positions
in CP, thus meeting the requirements of the proposition. As such, evidentials express
a specific configurational relationship between T and C. Arguably, evidentiality has
different overt representations cross-linguistically. Thus, evidence in Bulgarian and
Turkish goes hand-in-hand with modality and speaker attitude. In Donno So, on the
other hand, evidentiality is intertwined with logophoricity and person licensing.
The punch line of the paper is to show that evidentiality in Bulgarian is akin both
to epistemic modality and to grammatical aspect. In this respect, the author draws
a distinct line between hearsay evidentials (h-EVID) and inferential evidentials
(i-EVID), locating the former high in the C-domain and the latter in the vicinity of
ASP, in TP. It is argued that both kinds of evidentials are licensed by distinct functional
heads. The split between h-EVID and i-EVID is reminiscent of the split that A braham
(2002) makes between root modality (generated in vP) and epistemic modality (a CP