Abstract
A lack of consensus has existed regarding the interaction of English modals with categories such as tense, and individual modal forms can vary in the extent to which they make assertions regarding temporal reference. The present work attempts to provide a compositional semantic account of English modals by proposing that these forms may be inflected both for tense and for mood. The crosslinguistic status of inflectional moods such as the subjunctive is examined; it is argued that an inflectional subjunctive exists in Modern English with semantic properties similar to those of comparable forms in older Indo-European languages, and the extent to which linguistic cues would permit learners of English to acquire such a category is discussed. Data on English modals are reviewed in light of the analysis proposed here to determine its compatibility with observed usage. It is suggested that the analysis proposed here has certain advantages over models in which the observed semantic range of English modals is presented in terms of an unprincipled heterogeneity.
Acknowledgements
This paper has grown out of work originally presented at the CamLing Postgraduate Conference in Language Research, University of Cambridge, December 2010, and LangUE, University of Essex, June 2011. I am grateful to Kasia Jaszczolt for her comments on a much earlier version of this work, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions.
References
Aarts, Bas. 2012. The subjunctive conundrum in English. Folia Linguistica 46. 1–20.10.1515/flin.2012.1Search in Google Scholar
Allen, Joseph Henry, James Bradstreet Greenough, George Lyman Kittredge, Albert Andrew Howard & Benjamin Leonard D’Ooge (eds.). 1903. Allen and Greenough’s new Latin grammar for schools and colleges, rev. edn. Boston: Ginn.Search in Google Scholar
Baermann, Matthew & Greville G. Corbett. 2010. Defectiveness: Typology and diachrony. Proceedings of the British Academy 163. 1–18.10.5871/bacad/9780197264607.003.0001Search in Google Scholar
Boyé, Gilles & Patricia Cabredo Hofherr. 2010. Defectiveness as stem suppletion in French and Spanish verbs. Proceedings of the British Academy 163. 35–52.10.5871/bacad/9780197264607.003.0003Search in Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan L. 1995. The semantic development of past tense modals in English. In Joan Bybee & Suzanne Fleischman (eds.), Modality in grammar and discourse, 503–518. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/tsl.32.22bybSearch in Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan L., Revere Perkins & William Pagliuca. 1994. The evolution of grammar: Tense, aspect and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: A cross-linguistic perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Cormack, Annabel & Neil Smith. 2002. Modals and negation in English. In Sjef Barbiers, Frits Beukema & Wim van der Wurff (eds.), Modality and its interaction with the verbal system, 133–164. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/la.47.08corSearch in Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and aspect systems. Oxford: Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar
Fortson, Benjamin W.IV. 2004. Indo-European language and culture: An introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2009. The dependency of the subjunctive revisited: Temporal semantics and polarity. Lingua 119. 1883–1908.10.1016/j.lingua.2008.11.007Search in Google Scholar
Goodwin, William Watson. 1889. Syntax of the moods and tenses of the Greek verb, rev. edn. London: Macmillan.Search in Google Scholar
Gotti, Maurizio. 2003. Shall and will in contemporary English: A comparison with past uses. In Roberta Facchinetti, Manfred G. Krug & Frank R. Palmer (eds.), Modality in Contemporary English, 267–300. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Search in Google Scholar
Homer, Vincent. 2011. Polarity and modality. Los Angeles, CA: University of California at Los Angeles dissertation.Search in Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney. 2002. The verb. In Rodney Huddleston & Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds.), The Cambridge grammar of the English language, 71–212. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781316423530.004Search in Google Scholar
Iatridou, Sabine. 2000. The grammatical ingredients of counterfactuality. Linguistic Inquiry 31. 231–270.10.1162/002438900554352Search in Google Scholar
Iatridou, Sabine & Hedde Zeijlstra. 2010. On the scopal interaction of negation and deontic modals. In Maria Aloni, Harold Bastiaanse, Tikitu de Jager & Katrin Schulz (eds.), Logic, language and meaning, 315–324. Berlin: Springer.10.1007/978-3-642-14287-1_32Search in Google Scholar
Iatridou, Sabine & Hedde Zeijlstra. 2013. Negation, polarity and deontic modals. Linguistic Inquiry 44. 529–568.10.1162/LING_a_00138Search in Google Scholar
Jackendoff, Ray. 1972. Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Kratzer, Anjelika. 1977. What ‘must’ and ‘can’ must and can mean. Linguistics and Philosophy 1. 337–355.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199234684.003.0001Search in Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey. 2003. Modality on the move: The English modal auxiliaries 1961–1992. In Roberta Facchinetti, Manfred G. Krug & Frank R. Palmer (eds.), Modality in Contemporary English, 223–240. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Search in Google Scholar
Löfstedt, Leena. 2008. Le subjonctif imparfait de l’auxiliaire modal et l’infinitif du passé. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 109. 131–137.Search in Google Scholar
Maiden, Martin & Paul O’Neill. 2010. On morphomic defectiveness: Evidence from the Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula. Proceedings of the British Academy 163. 103–124.10.5871/bacad/9780197264607.003.0007Search in Google Scholar
Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English syntax, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119357.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Mustanoja, Tauno F. 1960. A middle English syntax. Helsinki: Societé Néophilologique.Search in Google Scholar
Nesselhauf, Nadja. 2010. The development of future time expressions in Late Modern English: Redistribution of forms or change in discourse? English Language and Linguistics 14. 163–186.10.1017/S1360674310000043Search in Google Scholar
Nordström, Jackie. 2010. Modality and subordinators. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/slcs.116Search in Google Scholar
Nuyts, Jan. 2001. Epistemic modality, language, and conceptualization. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/hcp.5Search in Google Scholar
Palmer, Frank R. 1986. Mood and modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Palmer, Frank R. 1990. Modality and the English modals, 2nd edn. London: Longman.Search in Google Scholar
Palmer, Frank R. 2001. Mood and modality, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139167178Search in Google Scholar
Papafragou, Anna. 2000. Modality: Issues in the semantics–pragmatics interface. Amsterdam: Elsevier.10.1163/9780585474199Search in Google Scholar
Portner, Paul. 1997. The semantics of mood, complementation, and conversational force. Natural Language Semantics 5. 167–212.10.1023/A:1008280630142Search in Google Scholar
Portner, Paul. 2009. Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Potts, Christopher. 2005. The logic of conventional implicatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199273829.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Reichenbach, Hans. 1947. Elements of symbolic logic. New York: Macmillan.Search in Google Scholar
Warner, Anthony. 1993. English auxiliaries: Structure and history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511752995Search in Google Scholar
Wurmbrand, Susanne. 1999. Modal verbs must be raising verbs. In Sonya Bird, Andrew Carnie, Jason D. Haugen & Peter Norquest (eds.), Proceedings of the 18th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 18), 599–612. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Search in Google Scholar
©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton