Table Of ContentModality: studies in form and function
Modality
Studies in form and function
Edited by
Alex Klinge
and
Henrik Høeg Müller
Published by
Equinox Publishing Ltd.
UK: Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London, SW11 2JW
USA: DBBC, 28 Main Street, Oakville, CT 06779
www.equinoxpub.com
First published 2005
Reprinted 2006
© 2005, Alex Klinge, Henrik Høeg Müller and contributors.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without
prior permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 1 904768 97 0 (Hardback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Modality : studies in form and function / edited by Alex Klinge and
Henrik Høeg Müller.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-904768-97-0 (hb)
1. Modality (Linguistics) I. Klinge, Alex. II. Müller, Henrik Høeg.
P299.M6M646 2005
415’.6--dc22
2004017481
Typeset by Catchline, Milton Keynes (www.catchline.com)
Printed and bound in the UK by Lightning Source UK. Ltd., Milton Keynes
and in the USA by Lightning Source Inc., La Vergne, TN
Contents
Contributors vi
Introduction 1
Alex Klinge and Henrik Høeg Müller
1 The modal confusion: 5
on terminology and the concepts behind it
Jan Nuyts
2 Subjective and objective modality 39
Michael Herslund
3 Modality and the concept of force-dynamic potential 49
Kasper Boye
4 Modality and subjectivity 81
Lars Heltoft
5 Discourse perspectives on modalisation: the case of accounts 103
in semi-structured interviews
Lars Fant
6 Categoricality and temporal projection of Spanish modals 123
Henrik Høeg Müller
7 On the modal values of the Italian Pluperfect 149
– with occasional reference to Danish and English
Iørn Korzen
8 Where there is a will, there is a modal 169
Alex Klinge
9 The syntagmatic and paradigmatic patterning of modality 187
in modern German
John Ole Askedal
10 Mood and modality in Russian, Danish, and Bulgarian. 215
Determinant categories and their expanding role
Per Durst-Andersen
11 Modal polyfunctionality and Standard Average European 247
Johan van der Auwera and Andreas Ammann, with Saskia Kindt
Index 273
Contributors
Andreas Ammann
University of Antwerp, Belgium
Per Durst-Andersen
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
John Ole Askedal
University of Oslo, Norway
Johan van der Auwera
University of Antwerp, Belgium
Kasper Boye
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Lars Fant
University of Stockholm, Sweden
Lars Heltoft
University of Roskilde, Denmark
Michael Herslund
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Saskia Kindt
University of Antwerp, Belgium
Alex Klinge
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Iørn Korzen
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Henrik Høeg Müller
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Jan Nuyts
University of Antwerp, Belgium
Introduction
Alex Klinge and Henrik Høeg Müller
Modality: intrigue and inspiration
Modality is one of the areas of study which continue to intrigue and inspire
logicians, philosophers and linguists. Since the pioneering work in philosophical
logic by von Wright in the 1950s, the kinds and degrees of modality relevant to
linguistic study, the subject of this volume, have been scrutinised and interpreted
in countless ways in countless languages. A cursory scan of a sample of salient
studies also reveals that the area of modality has served as one of the testing
grounds of the linguistic models of the day, e.g. the semantic features of Marino
(1973), the speech acts of Boyd and Thorne (1969) and, more recently, the
relevance theory of Papafragou (2000). In linguistics many descriptive concerns
have limited staying power, but modality does not seem to fall out of fashion.
What is it about modality that makes it so resilient? One very attractive
feature is that to capture its essence, it seems to be necessary to cut across the
boundaries of morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics and all dimen-
sions from cognition to communication are involved. It follows that studies
in modality hold challenges at all levels of linguistic description. Another
remarkable fact is that most often modality is not directly coded in linguistic
expressions but arises through interpretation in a context of utterance, be that
through conventional indirectness, metaphorical mapping, enrichment pro-
cedures, non-demonstrative inference or other context-bound mechanisms.
Modality thus poses a challenge to any theory which claims to retrace the path
from linguistic form to utterance interpretation. Finally, the elusive nature of the
concept of modality is in itself a motivating factor to anyone who sees his job
as a linguist as primarily one of providing conceptual clarification. As Nuyts
succinctly points out in this volume:
‘Modality’ is one of the ‘golden oldies’ among the basic notions in the
semantic analysis of language. But in spite of this, it also remains one of
the most problematic and controversial notions: there is no consensus on
how to define and characterise it, let alone on how to apply definitions in the
empirical analysis of data.
2 ALEx KLINGE & HENRIK HøEG MüLLER
The eleven studies of modality included in this volume1 address formal and
functional aspects of modality. The volume falls into three main parts roughly
reflecting three main perspectives on modality:
• Part I contains five articles which essentially take a top-down
perspective in that their main concern is one of conceptual
clarification of modal categories and modal functions;
• Part II contains four articles which essentially take a bottom-up
perspective in that their main concern is to trace the path from linguistic
form to utterance functions;
• Part III contains two articles which essentially take a lateral
perspective in that their main concern is to account for the functional
domain of modality across language types.
In Part I, Nuyts questions the felicity of trying to operate with a single-level
notion of modality that has to accommodate a plethora of functionally diverse
phenomena. Nuyts argues in favour of a supercategory of modality with several
universally motivated hierarchical subcategories which correlate with some
basic dimensions of perception and conceptual processing. According to Nuyts
it is not fruitful to look for modality as a category in language because only the
basic-level notions of epistemic, deontic, evidential, etc. are on a par with other
linguistic categories such as tense. Like Nuyts, Boye also calls for conceptual
clarification of the notions involved under the general heading of modality.
Boye’s own approach is cast in the framework of force dynamics, which offers
a set of independently motivated notions which are ideal for capturing modal
intensities. Boye introduces the complex notion of force-dynamic potential to
describe the meaning of Germanic modals and goes on to discuss the interplay
between modality and evidentiality.
Herslund convincingly shows that the dimensions of subjective and objec-
tive modality need to be taken seriously. Since Lyons (1977) introduced the dis-
tinction into the study of modality, too little has been done to clarify the notions
of objectivity and subjectivity. The centrality of the distinction is illustrated by
Herslund in specific and non-specific readings of the indefinite article, in the
function of the two Danish passives, in some peculiar uses of will-verbs and in
the use of Danish hearsay skulle. On the basis of the data discussed Herslund
extracts some of the features that must be elements in the definition of objective
modality. In the next chapter Heltoft sets himself the task to explain how levels
of linguistic expressions in an illocutionary and predicational hierarchy turn
into speaker subjectivity. Heltoft discusses speaker subjectivity on the basis
of data drawn from sentence topology, subjunctive mood, modal auxiliaries,
particles and sentence adverbials. Going into the act of communication Fant’s
INTRODUCTION 3
approach to modality is concerned with how discourse management is achieved
through the use of modality. Fant favours a particularly broad notional category
which includes communicative needs of rapport management, e.g. mitigation
or aggravation devices and intersubjectivity and own-speech management.
In Part II, four contributors take their point of departure in linguistic form.
It is noteworthy that only two contributors in this volume choose the semantics
of modal auxiliaries as their central object of study, viz. Müller, who discusses
the interplay of the Spanish modals deber, tener que and poder and tense in
various domains of interpretation, using categoricality as the fundamental
descriptive tool; and Klinge, who provides arguments in favour of treating
English will as a modal auxiliary on a par with the other central modals with
a point of departure in potentiality as the semantic field shared by the modal
auxiliaries. Korzen has a similarly narrow focus on the expression category
of the Italian tense system, more specifically the past perfect form trapassato
prossimo. He investigates how the meaning of ‘distance from present reality’
inherent in past tense translates into a meaning potential which spreads well
into modal territory and how this may be explored in discoursal backgrounding.
The perspective of these three writers is clearly bottom up, going from linguistic
form to contextually conditioned functions. In the fourth contribution in Part II
Askedal investigates linearisation patterns in German verb chains containing
modal verbs or predicates, which is a central concern to anyone assuming iconic
form-function correlations. Askedal shows that in fact such correlations may
be identified, though they do not appear to be perfect.
In Part III, Durst-Andersen introduces a new cognitively-oriented approach
to typology. His typology organises languages into speaker-oriented languages,
where mood is the determinant category, reality-oriented languages, where
aspect is the determinant category and hearer-oriented languages where tense
is the determinant category. It is argued that the determinant category of the
TAM-system will have a tendency to take over functions which are peripheral
to its own inherent semantic territory, ‘squeezing’ the other verbal categories,
which means that a study of the modal system of a given language requires
a study of the full interplay of the TAM-system. In their typological study
of modal polyfunctionality in 237 languages, van der Auwera et al. operate
with a narrow possibility-necessity pair as the object of focus, a dimension
easily traceable through a substantial number of languages. Since they have
no preconceived formal category to look for, a priori verbal categories, non-
verbal affixes, particles and adverbs all qualify as data on an equal footing.
Interestingly, on the basis of their findings they hint at the possibility that the
close association of modality with verbal categories might be a phenomenon
prevalent in languages which belong to a particular European Sprachbund.
