Inour most recent episode, we talked about modals: words like “can”, “may”, “must”, and more. In particular, we took a deep dive into the semanticsof modal verbs. But we didn’t talk much about how they fit into the structures of sentences, and this seems to leave open some important questions. For starters, we made the claim that — in terms of their meanings — modal verbs combine with whole sentences, and not just the verb phrase that follows them. After all, the meaning of the sentence in (1a) seems to correspond to (1b).
(1a) The Observers must report to their commander.
(1b) It must be that the Observers report to their commander.
On the face of it, it seems weird that subjects in modal sentences appear separate from the main verb phrase, as in (1a), while being interpreted as though they were right next to them, as in (1b). It looks like this could be a big problem for our overall theory.
Thankfully, when we take into account some of the important discoveries we’ve talked about in past episodes, like the VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis, this problem goes away pretty quick. If it’s true that, in general, subjects start off somewhere insidethe verb phrase, and only latermove to a spot that’s higher up (and more to the left, at least in English), we can suppose that the meanings of sentences — modal and all — are simply computed beforethe subject starts moving around, instead of after.
But, this still leaves us wondering what part of the tree modal verbs typically call home. If you want to know more about how to set that up, keep reading!
In our old system, we might’ve been happy dumping all our modal verbs into the bucket labelled “inflection.” And this seems reasonable at first, since like other kinds of inflection (e.g., tense, aspect, voice), modality sometimes appears as an affix on the verb.
(2) Turkish: gel-me-meli-siniz
come-ɴᴇɢ-ᴏʙʟɪɢ-2ᴘʟ
‘You ought not to come.’
But this probably isn’t the most sophisticated picture of how sentences get put together, given that concepts like tenseandmodalityare pretty different from each other. Moreover, if they really were members of the exact same category, you might not expect to find them showing up in the same place at the same time, like how a coin can’t land both heads and tails; in fact, most modal verbs have both present tense (may, can, shall, will) and past tense (might, could, should, would) forms.
So, it probably makes more sense to think of modal verbs as appearing either somewhere just below, or somewhere just above, a dedicated tense phrase (TP).
It might even be both, given that modal verbs seem to interact with tense in subtly different ways, depending on their flavour:
(3a) Olivia could have used her powers, but she didn’t want to.
(3b) Olivia could have used her powers, but I haven’t found out yet.
After all, the sentence in (3a), which is saying something about Olivia’s abilities, seems to be about what was possible in the past(i.e., circumstances might be different now), whereas the sentence in (3b) says something about the speaker’s presentstate of knowledge. In other words, it looks as if the same modal verb either falls under the influence of the past tense, or else manages to escape it, depending on how it’s interpreted. This suggests there might be modal phrases both below and above the tense phrase.
Lastly, it’s important to say something about how modal phrases actually get their meanings, and what that says about their internal structure. In the episode, we gave the modal verb “must” a meaning that looked like this:
(4) “must” = λ B . λ p . B ⊆ p
Reading it from left to right, it says that a modal verb first combines with some contextually defined modal base B — whose job it is to give the flavour, like whether it’s about belief or ability — and then goes on to combine with the sentence p, saying of the two that the set of worlds described by the base is a subset of the set of worlds described by the sentence. The modal base, then, is kind of like a pronoun; it’s like “they” or “them,” since it picks up its meaning from the context of the conversation. Whether “must” says something about someone’s knowledge, or about some set of rules to be followed, depends on the content of B. And if all this is right, it means that the structures of modal phrases — at a minimum — look something like this:
In reality, a bit more needs to be said about this, since a modal base by itself (as we’ve been thinking of it) can’t completely determine the meaning of the sentence. That’s because all the context can really provide is a general description of what’s being talked about — like whether what’s being discussed includes beliefs, rules, goals, abilities, et cetera. But, it can’t take the extra step of supplyingthose beliefs or rules or goals. To get a sense of why this makes a difference, take a look at the following sentence.
(5) I must report to the Colonel.
Imagine that this sentence is said by someone who mistakenly believes that the Colonel asked to see them. In this case, unbeknownst to the speaker, the sentence is false. And the reasonit’s false is because of what the actual requirements are, and not simply what the speaker might suppose they are. So, whether or not this kind of sentence ends up true or false depends on the way the world actually is, and not the way the speaker thinksit is. In other words, speakers can be uninformed about the content of the modal base, in a way that can’t be handled by context alone; that is, they can be mistaken about what the relevant rules or beliefs really consist of. And all of this means that the modal base must really be more like a function that’s meant to take some world as its input (the world in which the sentence is spoken), and then produce a set of worlds out of that, for the modal verb to work with — one that accurately captures whatever’s being talked about.
So, a more complete picture of what the internal structure of a modal phrase looks like is this:
What we see here is a function (sometimes called an accessibility relation) combining with a special kind of world pronoun. This relation R is what’s actually provided by the context of the conversation; it’s what determines the overall flavour. That w* symbol is what does the job of filling in the content of whatever’s being talked about, by providing the full set of rules or abilities under discussion. And it’s together that they determine the modal base — the set of worlds that modals like “must” or “may” go on to compare with the set of worlds described by the rest of the sentence. This way, we fully account for the fact that the truth of modal sentences depends not just on the context of the conversation, but on the way the world is.
As a final point, it’s worth mentioning that no matter which kind of structure we choose to represent modal sentences, none of them ever quite match up with how the sentence is actually pronounced. That is, the Logical Form of the sentence (how it’s interpreted), at least in these cases, is reliably different from its Phonetic Form (how it’s said). In fact, as it’s turned out, the idea that there are mismatches between how sentences are spoken and what they mean has played a big role in modern syntactic theory — one we’ll continue to talk about in the future!
How do we capture the meaning of “may” or “can”? What kinds of linguistic math do we need to understand them? In this week’s episode, we take a look at modality: where words like “must” fit in our meanings; how we consider many ways the world could be to account for their semantics; and how the same string of sounds can have a lot of flavours.
We must say, we’re happy to be back! Looking forward to hearing what people have to say. ^_^
We can put whole clauses inside other phrases, but what does that do to their structure and their meaning? In this week’s episode, we take a look at the syntax and semantics of relative clauses: how these clauses kind of look like adjectives; how using them creates islands from which words can’t escape; and how moving things around in them throws semantic variables into the sentence setup.
Looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say! ^_^
I’m kind of glad to hear that everyone does this. Because it means it isn’t colonizer bullshit, it’s what everyone does. It’s just people discovering new things. Everyone goes:
“Oh hey these people have their own style of [language A’s word for thing. Say, what do you call it?”
“Oh it’s [language B’s word for thing].”
“Got it, it’s [language B’s word for thing] variety [language A’s word for thing]”
This is seriously not colonizer bullshit, it’s just one of the common ways that loan words work.
linguistics side of tumblr please talk about how this is a type of reduplication
Andso, a finger on the monkey’s paw curled.
This isn’t a type of reduplication. Reduplication is a very specific linguistic phenomenon which refers to the duplication of phonemes, morphemes, words, or whole ass clauses, as a way to changing meaning, add or remove emphasis, or a whole bunch of other things. But it’s specifically about the repeatition of sound: ‘bread’ is reduplicated to ‘bread bread’ or 'brebread’ or 'breadad’ or what have you depending on your reduplication scheme; and not 'naan bread.’
Naan Bread and such are an example of an entirely different linguistic phenomenon centering reduncency, except it isn’t the sound that’s redundent but the meaning assigned to the sound. It’s the broadest terms, naan bread is a tautology(linguistics); narrowing in on specifics, it’s Semantic Pleonasm, in which two words which convey similar information are paired together to give the best combination of information; Think “tuna fish” for a monolingual example of variety-category semantic Pleonasm. Then getting to specifics, we have Bilingual Tautological/'Pleonastic’ Expressions, in which the combination of words are sourced from two differet languages. This is where we find 'Naan Bread’ and everything else this post is talking about.
