Modality in Contemporary English PDF
Preview Modality in Contemporary English
Modality in Contemporary English W DE G Topics in English Linguistics 44 Editors Bernd Kortmann Elizabeth Closs Traugott Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York Modality in Contemporary English Edited by Roberta Facchinetti Manfred Krug Frank Palmer Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York 2003 Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin. © Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability. ISBN 3-11-017686-6 Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at <http://dnb.ddb.de>. © Copyright 2003 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechan- ical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, with- out permission in writing from the publisher. Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin. Printed in Germany. Preface Roberta Facchinetti, Manfred Krug, Frank Palmer This volume is largely the result of a conference on contemporary English modality held at the University of Verona in September 2001, the aim of which was to foster interaction among scholars from different theoretical backgrounds with a common interest in English modality by promoting discussion, the exchange of ideas and the reporting of recent progress in the field. During the conference special attention was paid to (a) the syntax and semantics of modal elements, (b) modality and sociolinguistics and (c) modality and pragmatics. These three fields of study were discussed in detail from different perspectives, both theoretical and corpus-based: Generative syntactic theory, relevance theory and cognitive semantics each figured in various contributions; at the same time, the grammar of English modality was analyzed by means of empirical studies with data drawn mostly from synchronic corpora, both spoken and written, but also, to a lesser extent, from diachronic databases. Only a small selection of the over 50 papers presented at the conference have reached the publication stage in this book; despite differences in theoretical perspectives, terminology and topics, all of these papers offer fresh methodological impetus to a variety of current linguistic debates, converging around the following key issues: - The semantics and pragmatics of core modal verbs; - The status of emerging modal items; - Stylistic variation and change; - Sociolinguistic variation and syntactic models. Each one of these areas is dealt with in a section of the present volume and all of them are framed by Frank Palmer's introductory paper which offers an overview of the most topical issues in contemporary English modality from a functional perspective. After qualifying mood as largely a semantically vacuous subcategory within the broader field of modality, being governed almost exclusively by grammatical rather than semantic rules, he recalls the three main modal categories: epistemic, deontic and dynamic, and mentions a fourth one - evidential - which appears to be dominant in languages other than English, such as native American vi Roberta Facchinetti, Manfred Krug, Frank Palmer languages and the languages of Papua New Guinea. Within this notional framework, he attempts a theoretical, typological and functional explanation - rather than positing a close answer - to a range of specific issues, including can't as the suppletive form of negative epistemic must, the deontic functions of mustn't, the role of main-verb and modal-verb negation and the role of will in interrogative sentences with second person subjects. He also discusses the relationship between these modal verbs and semi-modals which are semantically close to them - be going to, have to, need, be supposed to, had better and would rather. The semantics and pragmatics of core modal verbs Modality is realized by linguistic items from a wide range of grammatical classes, covering not only modal auxiliaries and lexical verbs, but also nouns, adjectives, adverbs, idioms, particles, mood and prosody in speech. Despite these many possibilities, studies have been concerned more with modal verbs than with other linguistic forms, and have divided them into sub-classes according to shared syntactic and morphological features. Hence, oppositions such as "core/principal/central" vs. "marginal/semi- /quasi-modals", "primary" vs. "secondary", or simply "modals" vs. "modals to a lesser extent" have been used in order to distinguish verbs which are loosely interrelated in terms of common features - such as need, dare and be going to - from those which share the same NICE properties (negation, inversion, code, emphatic affirmation). Such great terminological diversity is mirrored in the different choices made by the contributors in the papers of the present book, though the title of this section adopts the general label of "core" modals to refer to those verbs which share all of the NICE properties; these verbs are may, might, can, could, shall, should, will, would and must. Issues of grammaticalization, of semantics and pragmatics, but also, though less extensively, of syntax, are taken up by the four contributors of this first section. Paul Larreya deals with the rules governing the use of the past tense morpheme in the grammar of English modals and suggests that, irrespectively of whether the past tense morpheme is carried by a lexical verb or by a modal, semantically it always expresses a particular type of presupposition. Starting from this assumption, he claims that in all of its uses - whether "temporal", "hypothetical" or "tentative" - the past tense morpheme expresses some type of presupposed (implicit) unreality. This presupposition of unreality is either "absolute" (i.e. counterfactual), as 'ml wish I knew the answer, or "relative", as in if I won the lottery... (which Preface vii presupposes ...but I'm not very likely to win it). It may also be either "direct" (as in I wish I knew the answer), or "indirect", as in you might have broken your leg. These different types of unreal presupposition make it possible to account for different types of "temporal", "hypothetical" or "tentative" uses of the past tense in the grammar of the English verb phrase. While Larreya's theoretical discussion finds ample confirmation in a host of examples mostly from could, should, would and might, Richard Matthews mainly focuses on might and could, and opens up the scope of his analysis to the pragmatic consequences of grammaticalization on modal concepts, in order to investigate how "modalized questions" are restricted in the interpretation of open and non-open questions. Specifically, for epistemically interpretable modals, a pragmatic differentiation between modal "submissions", "dissent" and "challenges" is made, while, for deontically interpretable modals, the differentiation is between modal enquiries, modal dissent and modal challenges; finally, within dynamic interpretations, Matthews distinguishes between modal enquiries and modal challenges. He proposes that modal submissions and enquiries permit only a rather limited set of modal auxiliary expressions, but that (subjective) modality forms like might are acceptable. This suggests that it is "modalized modality", i.e. so called remote forms, that is possible in "open" interrogation. This would also support the view that "open" questions are themselves inherently modal, i.e. without an ascription to the truth-value of the propositions they contain. Stephane Gresset also focuses on the values of might and could in order to reject the general belief that might and could may be quasi- equivalent or that could is replacing might as the main exponent of tentative epistemic possibility. His discussion is based on a contextual micro- analysis of two samples which testify to the fact that, however close the interpretations of might and could may be, some contextual features can generally be highlighted which pave the way for one modal rather than for the other, and these contextual elements can be related to the basic meanings of can and may, i.e. "unilateral" vs. "bilateral possibility". This opposition, supported by diachronic research and grammaticalization studies showing that root modality and epistemic modality are related, accounts for both the distinctive and the common interpretations of can/could and may/might. Finally, semantics and pragmatics are shown to be closely interrelated in the paper by Gregory Ward, Betty J. Birner and Jeffrey P. Kaplan, who start from the widely acknowledged assumption that a contextually salient open proposition (OP) is relevant for the felicity of a variety of constructions. For instance, the authors suggest the sentence That would be viii Roberta Facchinetti, Manfred Krug, Frank Palmer J.K. Rowling as a possible response to Who's the British woman over there? Here the speaker instantiates the variable in the OP "The British woman over there is X" with the value "J. K. Rowling" while conveying an epistemic disposition towards the selection of that particular instantiation. Ward et al. remark in the first place that previous work on modality has failed both to recognize the role of open propositions in the use of this construction and to characterize accurately its epistemic effect. Secondly, they show that the use of epistemic would requires a previously evoked OP, instantiates the variable with a discrete member of some salient set, and conventionally implicates that the speaker has conclusive objective evidence for the truth of the proposition. The status of emerging modal items In the past, the central English modals were the prime focus of research in modality, partly because they are identifiable in a relatively straightforward way with the help of the NICE properties. Modality, however, is a gradient (and not a binary) notion, and change within the modal system of any one language is endemic. Consequently there is a host of modal expressions in contemporary English, both verbal and non-verbal, which either already exhibit full-fledged modal features, or at least show signs of change towards more modal behaviour, i.e. of grammaticalization. Such items have recently become an additional focus of attention. It is in particular their semantic and pragmatic, but also their morpho-syntactic, properties which lead an increasing number of researchers to assume that these, too, are (emerging) modals - despite the fact that prima facie, i.e. on strict morpho-syntactic grounds on a strict morpho-syntactic level, they do not appear to be auxiliaries. While such modal expressions are still poorly understood compared to the rather well-investigated central modals, the papers in this section (as well as the contributions by Coates, Leech and Smith in later sections) represent an important step towards a better understanding of individual members of this group, and it is hoped that they can instigate further research into the dynamic and diverse class of emerging modals. Exemplary of research that adopts a wider definition of modality is the paper by Philippe Bourdin, who discusses the constructions go- V-en (as in The disease usually goes undetected until its later, more dangerous stages) and go-V-ing (as in Whenever I let him cook, he goes burning everything). In the data he presents, the verb go has been stripped of the notion of motion, wholly or in part, and of its spatial dimension; this has allowed go Preface ix to evolve into an exponent of aspectual values that are concomitants of the semantics of the un-V-en and V-ing constructions. Formally, neither instantiation of go meets any of the standard criteria of auxiliarihood. Yet both instances of go have assumed abstract, grammatical (aspectual) meanings at the expense of more concrete (spatial) ones (a process often referred to as "desemanticizaton" or "bleaching"), which is standardly associated with grammaticalization. In addition, both go constructions have taken on a modal value; indeed, the speaker is evaluating a state of affairs which is viewed as contravening the expectations one would normally have in the relevant type of situation. Still within the field of verbal modality, Keith Mitchell focuses on had better and might as well and argues in favour of a unitary analysis of the two expressions as an "inverse" (or "dual") pair, i.e. as a pair of expressions which are semantically related to each other in the same way as other pairs of modal expressions involving necessity and possibility or positive and neutral volition. Indeed, had better and might as well both contain an expression of a comparative relation: in the former case a relation of the "greater than" type and in the latter a relation of the "equal to or greater than" type - these two types of relation themselves standing in an inverse relationship to each other. Moreover, Mitchell shows that the two expressions form part of a system of options underlying the illocutionary act of giving advice, which is interpreted as involving the speaker's judgement of the comparative advantage of one course of action over another. Data from various corpora suggest, however, that the use of the two expressions is not restricted to advice-giving and that they have undergone a certain amount of semantic bleaching as well and so have taken on a more general deontic directive or decision-making function. Want to is another verbal construction that seems to enjoy incipient modal status, particularly so in informal contemporary British English speech, as testified to by Heidi Verplaetse. In her theoretical discussion she demonstrates that "volition" is a significant and highly common semantic notion that is well-embedded in the field of modality. Moreover, findings from earlier analyses reflect the private character of the mental state of volitional want to. This is supported also by syntactic and other patterns of its use, as it figures typically with first and second person subjects. Verplaetse's semantic description of want to allows her, finally, to show that the expression of volition with want to is becoming increasingly internalized in the grammar and is gaining pace in contemporary English. In a case-study of non-verbal modality, Carita Paradis tackles the various readings of really within the framework of cognitive semantics. In her corpus-based study, she identifies and explains the emergence of three
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