Narrog (2010): (Inter)subjectification in the Domain of Modality and Mood #

This file formalizes the use [Nar10a] makes of the eight most frequent changes of modal meaning in the sample of [BPP94]. The chapter places the uses of modal markers on a map with two dimensions. Volitivity separates the modalities in which an element of will is present, deontic and boulomaic modality, from those in which it is absent, epistemic, evidential, and dynamic modality (ModalFlavor.IsVolitive). Speaker orientation runs from event-oriented uses up through modality proper to mood and illocutionary force modulation, and the chapter's claim is that a change never decreases it, whatever the change does to volitivity. The tabulated meanings are force-flavor pairs, the future, and two directive moods (Meaning), which fixes the volitivity of source and target and tells modality proper from mood. On that basis change is attested within and across the two sides of volitivity in every combination (volitivity_independent), each change from non-volitive to volitive meaning is more frequent than each deontic-to-epistemic one (toNonVolitive_lt_toVolitive), so the deontic-to-epistemic shift is one change among several and not the representative one, and no change leads out of mood (source_not_isMood). The changes into mood, future and possibility markers becoming imperatives and admonitives and obligation markers becoming imperatives, reach the top of the map and so conform wherever the source use lay. A change from probability to an event-oriented obligation is what the chapter names as a counterexample and finds undocumented.

The chapter's second half asks why strong obligation is rarely grammaticalized: must-type markers were found in sixty of two hundred languages, and the Japanese strong-necessity construction occurs with no second-person subject in the corpus counts the chapter cites. Imperatives are in principle always performative and used under full authority, while obligation markers either report obligations or impose them without such authority, which is face-threatening, so that direct reference to obligation is habitually avoided in many cultures and obligation markers are less often available as sources of epistemic ones. That argument and its counts are not formalized.

Implementation notes #

The chapter argues that the five tabulated changes within modality proper also increase speaker orientation, the deontic-to-epistemic ones included, but it assigns no positions to their meanings, and orientation is a property of a use and not of a meaning label, so no orientation is assigned to a meaning here. The scale itself is Narrog2012.SpeechActOrientation, in the later book's terms, and that study checks these changes against it. Strong obligation and certainty are read as necessity, weak obligation and probability as weak necessity, and root possibility and ability as circumstantial possibility; a label that does not mention strength is read as the strong force. ModalFlavor files teleological modality under the circumstantial flavor, which IsVolitive treats as non-volitive.

Narrog (2010): (Inter)subjectification in the Domain of Modality and Mood #

Implementation notes #

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