Title: The semantic field of the English modal auxiliary can interacting with the grammatical aspect of the main verb in contemporary American English
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2019, vol. 45, iss. 1, pp. [75]-94
Extent
[75]-94
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2019-1-5
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/140996
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
Existing research recognizes the important role aspect plays in the interpretation of modal readings. This paper presents an empirical approach to this area of study, based on corpus material. The investigation described here is part of the author's large-scale corpus research into modality-aspect interfaces. It traces patterns of interaction as exhibited in the Kratzerian semantic field of the English modal auxiliary can and the grammatical aspects which follow it within matrix predicates. The analyzed language samples were extracted from The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The study demonstrates patterns of interaction between the modal readings of can and the grammatical aspectual forms of the main verb. Moreover, it also shows that when modality concerns past events expressed through the perfect aspect, it tends to take epistemic conversational backgrounds. In addition to this, this research has also revealed the interaction of modality with subjectival negation.
References
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[28] Nuyts, Jan (2006) Modality: Overview and linguistic issues. In: Frawley, William (ed.) The Expression of Modality. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 1–26.
[29] Palmer, Frank R. (1979/1990) Modality and the English Modals. London: Longman.
[30] Palmer, Frank R. (1986/2001) Mood and Modality (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[31] Payne, John R. (1985) Negation. In: Shopen, Timothy (ed.) Language Typology and Syntactic Description vol. I: Clause Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 197–242.
[32] Payne, Thomas E. (1997) Describing Morphosyntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[33] Perzanowski, Jerzy (2006) Ontyka modalności. In: Strawiński, Witold, Grygianiec, Mariusz and Anna Brożek (eds.) Myśli o Języku, Nauce i Wartościach. Księga Ofiarowana Profesorowi Jackowi Juliuszowi Jadackiemu w Sześćdziesiątą Rocznicę Urodzin. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Semper, 281–297.
[34] Portner, Paul (2009) Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[35] Pruss, Alexander R. (2001) Possible Worlds: What They Are Good for and What They Are. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh.
[36] Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey and Jan Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London and New York: Longman Group Limited.
[37] Sasse, Hans-Jürgen (2002) Recent activity in the theory of aspect: Accomplishments, achievements, or just non-progressive state?. Linguistic Typology 6 (2), 199–271.
[38] Smith, Carlota S. (1997) The Parameter of Aspect. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
[39] Sweetser, Eve E. (1982) Root and epistemic modals: causality in two worlds. In: Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1982). Berkley, C.A.: Berkley Linguistics Society, 484–507.
[40] Szymański, Leszek (2015) An empirical analysis of the semantic field of the English modal auxiliary verb 'may' in 19th-century American English exampled in the novel "Moby Dick; or, the Whale" by Herman Melville. Biuletyn Polskiego Towarzystwa Językoznawczego 71, 93–109.
[41] Szymański, Leszek (2016a) The interaction of negated 'must' and grammatical aspect in contemporary American English – An empirical contribution to aspect-modality interaction studies. In: Hinton, Martin (ed.), Evidence, Experiment and Argument in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Edition, 111–130.
[42] Szymański, Leszek (2016b) Towards a transboundary approach to the analysis of linguistic modality – Elements of an empirical investigation of the modal auxiliary 'must' in contemporary American English. Biuletyn Polskiego Towarzystwa Językoznawczego 72, 211–229.
[43] Szymański, Leszek (2017) An empirical investigation of the allegedly non-normative modal predicate with 'must', 'not', and the perfect infinitive of the main verb. Biuletyn Polskiego Towarzystwa Językoznawczego 73, 247–258.
[44] Szymański, Leszek (2017) Modal Auxiliaries and Aspect in Contemporary American English – A Corpus-based Study. Zielona Góra: Oficyna Wydawnicza Uniwersytetu Zielonogórskiego.
[45] Vendler, Zeno (1957) Verbs and times. The Philosophical Review, 66 (2), 143–160. | DOI 10.2307/2182371
[46] Vince, Michel (2009) First Certificate Language Practice. London: Macmillan.
[47] von Fintel, Kai (2006) Modality and language. In: Borchert, Donald M. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2nd edition). Detroit: Gale/Thomson Learning, 20–27.
[2] Abraham, Werner and Elisabeth Leiss (eds.) (2008) Modality–Aspect Interfaces: Implications and Typological Solutions. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
[3] Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan and Edward Finegan (1999/2007) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.
[4] Binnick, Robert I. (1991) Time and the Verb: A Guide to Tense and Aspect. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[5] Binnick, Robert I. (2002–2006) The Project on Annotated Bibliography of Contemporary Research in Tense, Grammatical Aspect, Aktionsart, and Related Areas. Scarborough: University of Toronto. Available at http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~binnick/TENSE/ (Accessed on 19 January, 2019).
[6] Binnick, Robert I. (2005) The markers of habitual aspect in English. Journal of English Linguistics 33(4), 339–369. | DOI 10.1177/0075424205286006
[7] Binnick, Robert I. (2006) Aspect and aspectuality. In: Aarts, Bas and April McMahon (eds.) The Handbook of English Linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 244–268.
[8] Bybee, Joan, Perkins, Revere and Wiliam Pagliuca (1994) The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
[9] Chrzanowska-Kluczewska, Elżbieta (2013) Literary semantics and literary pragmatics – (in)separable disciplines?. Biuletyn Polskiego Towarzystwa Językoznawczego 69, 77–94.
[10] Comrie, Bernard (1976/2001) Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems. Cambridge: New York: Cambridge University Press.
[11] Dahl, Östen (1985) Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell.
[12] Davies, Mark (2008–) The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 560 million words, 1990–present. Available at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ (Accessed on 19 January, 2019).
[13] de Haan, Ferdinand (1997) The Interaction of Modality and Negation. A Typological Study. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc.
[14] Eckhoff, Hanne, and Dag Haug (2015) Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic. Diachronica 32 (2), 186–230.
[15] Hacquard, Valentine (2009) On the interaction of aspect and modal auxiliaries. Linguistics and Philosophy 32, 279–312. | DOI 10.1007/s10988-009-9061-6
[16] Hacquard, Valentine (2011) Modality. In: Maienborn, Claudia, von Heusinger, Klaus and Paul Portner (eds.) Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1484–1515.
[17] Hacquard, Valentine (2013) On the grammatical category of modality. In: Aloni, Maria, Franke, Michael and Floris Roelofsen (eds.) Proceedings of the 19th Amsterdam Colloquium, 19–26.
[18] Higginbotham, James (2009) Tense, Aspect and Indexicality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[19] Hintikka, Jaakko (1962) Knowledge and Belief. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
[20] Huddleston, Rodney D. and Geoffrey K. Pullum (2002) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[21] Kotin, Michail L. (2012) Modalitäten. In: Pawłowski, Grzegorz, Olpińska-Szkiełko, Magdalena and Silvia Bonacchi (eds.) Mensch – Sprachen – Kulturen: Beiträge und Materialien der Internationalen Wissenschaftlichen Jahrestagung des Verbandes Polnischer Germanisten 25.-27. Mai 2012. Warszawa. Warszawa: Euro-Edukacja, 140–158.
[22] Kotin, Michail L. (2014) Modalitäten im Sprachkontrast: Nochmals zu der Aspektualität-Modalität-Schnittstelle. In: Lukas, Katarzyna and Izabela Olszewska (eds.) Deutsch im Kontakt und im Kontrast: Festschrift für Prof. Andrzej Kątny zum 65. Geburstag. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 105–117.
[23] Kratzer, Angelika (1977) What 'must' and 'can' must and can mean. Linguistics and Philosophy 1(3), 337–355. | DOI 10.1007/BF00353453
[24] Kratzer, Angelika (1991) Modality. In: von Stechow, Armin and Dieter Wunderlich (eds.) Semantics: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research. Berlin: de Gruyter, 639–650.
[25] Kratzer, Angelika (2012) Modals and Conditionals: New and Revised Perspectives. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
[26] Lyons, John (1977) Semantics vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[27] Morante, Roser and Caroline Sporleder (2012) Modality and negation: An introduction to the special issue. Computational Linguistics 38(2), 223–260. | DOI 10.1162/COLI_a_00095
[28] Nuyts, Jan (2006) Modality: Overview and linguistic issues. In: Frawley, William (ed.) The Expression of Modality. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 1–26.
[29] Palmer, Frank R. (1979/1990) Modality and the English Modals. London: Longman.
[30] Palmer, Frank R. (1986/2001) Mood and Modality (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[31] Payne, John R. (1985) Negation. In: Shopen, Timothy (ed.) Language Typology and Syntactic Description vol. I: Clause Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 197–242.
[32] Payne, Thomas E. (1997) Describing Morphosyntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[33] Perzanowski, Jerzy (2006) Ontyka modalności. In: Strawiński, Witold, Grygianiec, Mariusz and Anna Brożek (eds.) Myśli o Języku, Nauce i Wartościach. Księga Ofiarowana Profesorowi Jackowi Juliuszowi Jadackiemu w Sześćdziesiątą Rocznicę Urodzin. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Semper, 281–297.
[34] Portner, Paul (2009) Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[35] Pruss, Alexander R. (2001) Possible Worlds: What They Are Good for and What They Are. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh.
[36] Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey and Jan Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London and New York: Longman Group Limited.
[37] Sasse, Hans-Jürgen (2002) Recent activity in the theory of aspect: Accomplishments, achievements, or just non-progressive state?. Linguistic Typology 6 (2), 199–271.
[38] Smith, Carlota S. (1997) The Parameter of Aspect. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
[39] Sweetser, Eve E. (1982) Root and epistemic modals: causality in two worlds. In: Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1982). Berkley, C.A.: Berkley Linguistics Society, 484–507.
[40] Szymański, Leszek (2015) An empirical analysis of the semantic field of the English modal auxiliary verb 'may' in 19th-century American English exampled in the novel "Moby Dick; or, the Whale" by Herman Melville. Biuletyn Polskiego Towarzystwa Językoznawczego 71, 93–109.
[41] Szymański, Leszek (2016a) The interaction of negated 'must' and grammatical aspect in contemporary American English – An empirical contribution to aspect-modality interaction studies. In: Hinton, Martin (ed.), Evidence, Experiment and Argument in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Edition, 111–130.
[42] Szymański, Leszek (2016b) Towards a transboundary approach to the analysis of linguistic modality – Elements of an empirical investigation of the modal auxiliary 'must' in contemporary American English. Biuletyn Polskiego Towarzystwa Językoznawczego 72, 211–229.
[43] Szymański, Leszek (2017) An empirical investigation of the allegedly non-normative modal predicate with 'must', 'not', and the perfect infinitive of the main verb. Biuletyn Polskiego Towarzystwa Językoznawczego 73, 247–258.
[44] Szymański, Leszek (2017) Modal Auxiliaries and Aspect in Contemporary American English – A Corpus-based Study. Zielona Góra: Oficyna Wydawnicza Uniwersytetu Zielonogórskiego.
[45] Vendler, Zeno (1957) Verbs and times. The Philosophical Review, 66 (2), 143–160. | DOI 10.2307/2182371
[46] Vince, Michel (2009) First Certificate Language Practice. London: Macmillan.
[47] von Fintel, Kai (2006) Modality and language. In: Borchert, Donald M. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2nd edition). Detroit: Gale/Thomson Learning, 20–27.