Modality (semantics)

Last updated

In linguistics and philosophy, modality refers to the ways language can express various relationships to reality or truth. For instance, a modal expression may convey that something is likely, desirable, or permissible. Quintessential modal expressions include modal auxiliaries such as "could", "should", or "must"; modal adverbs such as "possibly" or "necessarily"; and modal adjectives such as "conceivable" or "probable". However, modal components have been identified in the meanings of countless natural language expressions, including counterfactuals, propositional attitudes, evidentials, habituals, and generics.

Contents

Modality has been intensely studied from a variety of perspectives. Within linguistics, typological studies have traced crosslinguistic variation in the strategies used to mark modality, with a particular focus on its interaction with tense–aspect–mood marking. Theoretical linguists have sought to analyze both the propositional content and discourse effects of modal expressions using formal tools derived from modal logic. Within philosophy, linguistic modality is often seen as a window into broader metaphysical notions of necessity and possibility.

Force and flavor

Modal expressions come in different categories called flavors. Flavors differ in how the possibilities they discuss relate to reality. For instance, an expression like "might" is said to have epistemic flavor, since it discusses possibilities compatible with some body of knowledge. An expression like "obligatory" is said to have deontic flavor, since it discusses possibilities which are required given the laws or norms obeyed in reality. [1] : 47 

(1) Agatha must be the murderer. (expressing epistemic modality)
(2) Agatha must go to jail. (expressing deontic modality)

The sentence in (1) might be spoken by someone who has decided that all of the relevant facts in a particular murder investigation point to the conclusion that Agatha was the murderer, even though it may or may not actually be the case. The 'must' in this sentence thus expresses epistemic modality: "'for all we know', Agatha must be the murderer", where 'for all we know' is relative to some knowledge the speakers possess. In contrast, (2) might be spoken by someone who has decided that, according to some standard of conduct, Agatha has committed a vile crime, and therefore the correct course of action is to jail Agatha.

In classic formal approaches to linguistic modality, an utterance expressing modality is one that can always roughly be paraphrased to fit the following template:

(3) According to [a set of rules, wishes, beliefs,...] it is [necessary, possible] that [the main proposition] is the case.

The set of propositions which forms the basis of evaluation is called the modal base. The result of the evaluation is called the modal force. [2] : 649  For example, the utterance in (4) expresses that, according to what the speaker has observed, it is necessary to conclude that John has a rather high income:

(4) John must be earning a lot of money.

The modal base here is the knowledge of the speaker, the modal force is necessity. By contrast, (5) could be paraphrased as 'Given his abilities, the strength of his teeth, etc., it is possible for John to open a beer bottle with his teeth'. Here, the modal base is defined by a subset of John's abilities, the modal force is possibility.

(5) John can open a beer bottle with his teeth.

Formal semantics

Linguistic modality has been one of the central concerns in formal semantics and philosophical logic. Research in these fields has led to a variety of accounts of the propositional content and conventional discourse effects of modal expressions. The predominant approaches in these fields are based on modal logic. In these approaches, modal expressions such as must and can are analyzed as quantifiers over a set of possible worlds. In classical modal logic, this set is identified as the set of worlds accessible from the world of evaluation. Since the seminal work of Angelika Kratzer, formal semanticists have adopted a more finely grained notion of this set as determined by two conversational background functions called the modal base and ordering source respectively. [3] : 79–90 

For an epistemic modal like English must or might, this set is understood to contain exactly those worlds compatible with the knowledge that the speaker has in the actual world. Assume for example that the speaker of sentence (4) above knows that John just bought a new luxury car and has rented a huge apartment. The speaker also knows that John is an honest person with a humble family background and doesn't play the lottery. The set of accessible worlds is then the set of worlds in which all these propositions which the speaker knows about John are true. The notions of necessity and possibility are then defined along the following lines: A proposition P follows necessarily from the set of accessible worlds, if all accessible worlds are part of P (that is, if p is true in all of these worlds). [3] : 80  Applied to the example in (4) this would mean that in all the worlds which are defined by the speaker's knowledge about John, it is the case that John earns a lot of money (assuming there is no other explanation for John's wealth). In a similar way a proposition p is possible according to the set of accessible worlds (i.e. the modal base), if some of these worlds are part of P.

Recent work has departed from this picture in a variety of ways. In dynamic semantics, modals are analyzed as tests which check whether their prejacent is compatible with (or follows from) the information in the conversational common ground. Probabilistic approaches motivated by gradable modal expressions provide a semantics which appeals to speaker credence in the prejacent. Illocutionary approaches assume a sparser view of modals' propositional content and look to conventional discourse effects to explain some of the nuances of modals' use.

Grammatical expression of modality

Verbal morphology

In many languages modal categories are expressed by verbal morphology – that is, by alterations in the form of the verb. If these verbal markers of modality are obligatory in a language, they are called mood markers. Well-known examples of moods in some European languages are referred to as subjunctive, conditional, and indicative as illustrated below with examples from French, all three with the verb avoir 'to have'. As in most Standard European languages, the shape of the verb conveys not only information about modality, but also about other categories such as person and number of the subject.

(6)

Je

1SG

doute

doubt

que

that

vous

2PL

ayez

have.2PL.SJV

raison.

right

Je doute que vous ayez raison.

1SG doubt that 2PL have.2PL.SJV right

'I doubt that you're right.'

(7)

Si

If

c'était

this-was

vrai,

true

on

one

l'aurait

it-have.SG.COND

vu

seen

sur

on

CNN

CNN‍

Si c'était vrai, on l'aurait vu sur CNN

If this-was true one it-have.SG.COND seen on CNN‍

'If this were true, one would have seen it on CNN.'

(8)

Il

3SG

a

have.3SG.IND

raison

right

Il a raison

3SG have.3SG.IND right

'He's right.'

An example for a non-European language with a similar encoding of modality is Manam. Here, a verb is prefixed by a morpheme which encodes number and person of the subject. These prefixes come in two versions, realis and irrealis. Which one is chosen depends on whether the verb refers to an actual past or present event (realis), or merely to a possible or imagined event (irrealis). [4]

Auxiliaries

Modal auxiliary verbs, such as the English words may, can, must, ought, will, shall, need, dare, might, could, would, and should, are often used to express modality, especially in the Germanic languages.

Ability, desirability, permission, obligation, and probability can all be exemplified by the usage of auxiliary modal verbs in English:

Ability: I can ride a bicycle (in the present); I could ride a bicycle (in the past)
Desirability: I should go; I ought to go
Permission: I may go
Obligation: I must go
Likelihood: He might be there; He may be there; He must be there

Lexical expression

Verbs such as "want," "need," or "belong" can be used to express modality lexically, as can adverbs.

(9) It belongs in a museum!

Other

Complementizers (e.g. Russian) and conjunctions (e.g. Central Pomo [5] ) can be used to convey modality.

See also

Related Research Articles

Understood in a narrow sense, philosophical logic is the area of logic that studies the application of logical methods to philosophical problems, often in the form of extended logical systems like modal logic. Some theorists conceive philosophical logic in a wider sense as the study of the scope and nature of logic in general. In this sense, philosophical logic can be seen as identical to the philosophy of logic, which includes additional topics like how to define logic or a discussion of the fundamental concepts of logic. The current article treats philosophical logic in the narrow sense, in which it forms one field of inquiry within the philosophy of logic.

Modal logic is a kind of logic used to represent statements about necessity and possibility. It plays a major role in philosophy and related fields as a tool for understanding concepts such as knowledge, obligation, and causation. For instance, in epistemic modal logic, the formula can be used to represent the statement that is known. In deontic modal logic, that same formula can represent that is a moral obligation. Modal logic considers the inferences that modal statements give rise to. For instance, most epistemic modal logics treat the formula as a tautology, representing the principle that only true statements can count as knowledge. However, this formula is not a tautology in deontic modal logic, since what ought to be true can be false.

Counterfactual conditionals are conditional sentences which discuss what would have been true under different circumstances, e.g. "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here." Counterfactuals are contrasted with indicatives, which are generally restricted to discussing open possibilities. Counterfactuals are characterized grammatically by their use of fake tense morphology, which some languages use in combination with other kinds of morphology including aspect and mood.

A modal verb is a type of verb that contextually indicates a modality such as a likelihood, ability, permission, request, capacity, suggestion, order, obligation, necessity, possibility or advice. Modal verbs generally accompany the base (infinitive) form of another verb having semantic content. In English, the modal verbs commonly used are can, could, may, might, shall, should, will, would, and ought.

In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and if so, what kind. An evidential is the particular grammatical element that indicates evidentiality. Languages with only a single evidential have had terms such as mediative, médiatif, médiaphorique, and indirective used instead of evidential.

Deontic modality is a linguistic modality that indicates how the world ought to be according to certain norms, expectations, speaker desires, etc. In other words, a deontic expression indicates that the state of the world does not meet some standard or ideal, whether that standard be social, personal (desires), etc. The sentence containing the deontic modal generally indicates some action that would change the world so that it becomes closer to the standard or ideal.

A realis mood is a grammatical mood which is used principally to indicate that something is a statement of fact; in other words, to express what the speaker considers to be a known state of affairs, as in declarative sentences. Most languages have a single realis mood called the indicative mood, although some languages have additional realis moods, for example to express different levels of certainty. By contrast, an irrealis mood is used to express something that is not known to be the case in reality.

In linguistics, irrealis moods are the main set of grammatical moods that indicate that a certain situation or action is not known to have happened at the moment the speaker is talking. This contrasts with the realis moods. They are used in statements without truth value

Alethic modality is a linguistic modality that indicates modalities of truth, in particular the modalities of logical necessity, contingency, possibility and impossibility.

In linguistics, a complementizer or complementiser is a functional category that includes those words that can be used to turn a clause into the subject or object of a sentence. For example, the word that may be called a complementizer in English sentences like Mary believes that it is raining. The concept of complementizers is specific to certain modern grammatical theories. In traditional grammar, such words are normally considered conjunctions. The standard abbreviation for complementizer is C.

Epistemic modality is a sub-type of linguistic modality that encompasses knowledge, belief, or credence in a proposition. Epistemic modality is exemplified by the English modals may, might, must. However, it occurs cross-linguistically, encoded in a wide variety of lexical items and grammatical structures. Epistemic modality has been studied from many perspectives within linguistics and philosophy. It is one of the most studied phenomena in formal semantics.

Epistemic modal logic is a subfield of modal logic that is concerned with reasoning about knowledge. While epistemology has a long philosophical tradition dating back to Ancient Greece, epistemic logic is a much more recent development with applications in many fields, including philosophy, theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, economics, and linguistics. While philosophers since Aristotle have discussed modal logic, and Medieval philosophers such as Avicenna, Ockham, and Duns Scotus developed many of their observations, it was C. I. Lewis who created the first symbolic and systematic approach to the topic, in 1912. It continued to mature as a field, reaching its modern form in 1963 with the work of Kripke.

Angelika Kratzer is a professor emerita of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Araki is a nearly extinct language spoken in the small island of Araki, south of Espiritu Santo Island in Vanuatu. Araki is gradually being replaced by Tangoa, a language from a neighbouring island.

In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying. The term is also used more broadly to describe the syntactic expression of modality – that is, the use of verb phrases that do not involve inflection of the verb itself.

Dynamic semantics is a framework in logic and natural language semantics that treats the meaning of a sentence as its potential to update a context. In static semantics, knowing the meaning of a sentence amounts to knowing when it is true; in dynamic semantics, knowing the meaning of a sentence means knowing "the change it brings about in the information state of anyone who accepts the news conveyed by it." In dynamic semantics, sentences are mapped to functions called context change potentials, which take an input context and return an output context. Dynamic semantics was originally developed by Irene Heim and Hans Kamp in 1981 to model anaphora, but has since been applied widely to phenomena including presupposition, plurals, questions, discourse relations, and modality.

Tense–aspect–mood or tense–modality–aspect is an important group of grammatical categories, which are marked in different ways by different languages.

Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal concepts from logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. It provides accounts of what linguistic expressions mean and how their meanings are composed from the meanings of their parts. The enterprise of formal semantics can be thought of as that of reverse-engineering the semantic components of natural languages' grammars.

In linguistics, veridicality is a semantic or grammatical assertion of the truth of an utterance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank R. Palmer</span> British linguist (1922–2019)

Frank Robert Palmer was a British linguist who was instrumental in the development of the Department of Linguistic Science at the University of Reading.

References

  1. ↑ Portner, Paul (2009). Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-929242-4.
  2. ↑ Kratzer, A. (1991). Modality. In: von Stechow, A. & Wunderlich, D. (Eds.) Semantics: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
  3. 1 2 Kaufmann, S.; Condoravdi, C. & Harizanov, V. (2006) Formal approaches to modality. Formal approaches to modality. In: Frawley, W. (Ed.). The Expression of Modality. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter
  4. ↑ see: Elliott, Jennifer R. (2000). Realis and irrealis: Forms and concepts of the grammaticalisation of reality. In: Linguistic Typology (Vol. 4, pp. 55-90).
  5. ↑ Mithun, M. (1995). On the Relativity of Irreality. In: Bybee, J. & Fleischman, S. (Eds.) Modality in Grammar and Discourse John Benjamins

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.