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Modality in Typological Perspective ILLC Dissertation Series DS-2008-08 Modality in Typological Perspective ILLC Dissertation Series DS-2008-08 For further information about ILLC-publications, please contact Institute for Logic, Language and Computation Universiteit van Amsterdam Plantage Muidergracht 24 1018 TV Amsterdam phone: +31-20-525 6051 fax: +31-20-525 5206 e-mail: [email protected] homepage: http://www.illc.uva.nl/ Modality in Typological Perspective Academisch Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. D.C. van den Boom ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel op donderdag 4 september 2008, te 10.00 uur door Fabrice Dominique Nauze geboren te Mont-de-Marsan, Frankrijk Promotiecommissie Promotor: prof. dr. F.J.M.M. Veltman Co-promotor: prof. dr. P.C. Hengeveld Overige leden: prof. dr. M. Bittner prof. dr. P.C. Muysken prof. dr. M.J.B. Stokhof prof. dr. J. van der Auwera dr. H.H. Zeijlstra Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen Copyright c 2008 by Fabrice Nauze Cover design by Nicolas Nauze. Printed and bound by PrintPartners Ipskamp, Enschede. ISBN: 978-90-9023343-7 Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Typology and modality 7 1.1 Typology . 7 1.1.1 Variation in the languages of the world . 7 1.1.2 Language comparison . 8 1.1.3 Three steps of typology . 9 1.1.4 Language sample . 10 1.1.5 Language universals . 11 1.2 Typologies of modality . 12 1.2.1 Palmer . 12 1.2.2 Hengeveld . 14 1.2.3 Van der Auwera and Plungian . 16 1.2.4 Typology of modality . 18 2 Typological investigation of six modal systems 19 2.1 Dutch . 20 2.1.1 Dutch modal system . 21 2.1.2 Combinations of modal items . 30 2.2 Fon cluster . 36 2.2.1 Fon modal system . 38 2.2.2 Combinations of modal items . 49 2.3 Korean . 54 2.3.1 Korean modal system . 54 2.3.2 Combinations of modal items . 69 2.4 Lillooet . 71 2.4.1 Lillooet modal system . 73 v 2.4.2 Combinations of modal items . 84 2.5 Turkish . 89 2.5.1 Turkish modal system . 90 2.5.2 Combinations of modal items . 100 2.6 Tuvaluan . 103 2.6.1 Tuvaluan modal system . 106 2.6.2 Combinations of modal items . 115 2.7 Typological conclusions . 119 2.7.1 Participant-internal modality . 120 2.7.2 Participant-external modality . 125 2.7.3 Epistemic modality . 127 2.7.4 Combinations of modal items . 127 2.7.5 Polyfunctionality . 127 3 Formal semantics of modality 131 3.1 Kratzer’s semantics of modality . 131 3.1.1 Relative modality . 132 3.1.2 Double relativity . 137 3.1.3 Example . 141 3.2 Extensions of the standard framework . 143 3.2.1 Goal-oriented modality . 143 3.2.2 Modals and conditionals . 145 3.2.3 Brennan: the epistemic/root distinction . 146 4 Some problems of the standard framework 153 4.1 Polyfunctionality and context-dependence . 153 4.1.1 Ineffability of conversational backgrounds . 154 4.1.2 Non-polyfunctional modals . 156 4.1.3 Polyfunctional modals . 157 4.1.4 Conclusion . 157 4.2 Participant-internal modality . 158 4.2.1 Asymmetry . 158 4.2.2 Disjunctive abilities . 160 4.2.3 Inference from epistemic modality . 161 4.3 Participant-external modality . 163 4.3.1 The content of a deontic ordering source . 163 4.3.2 Zvolenszky’s problem . 165 4.3.3 Goal-oriented modality . 170 4.4 Combinations of modals . 175 vi 5 Update semantics framework 181 5.1 Epistemic and deontic modality . 182 5.1.1 Epistemic above deontic modality . 201 5.1.2 In the scope of deontic modals . 202 5.2 Goal-oriented and participant-internal modality . 204 5.2.1 Goal-oriented modality: a first sketch . 205 5.2.2 Participant-internal modality . 211 Conclusion 219 List of abbreviations 225 Samenvatting 227 Bibliography 229 vii Acknowledgments One piece of advice I can give to any new PhD student is to start right away with the writing of their acknowledgements. As you might expect, it is too late for me to follow this advice; for all those I forget to mention, my sincere apologies. However as the process of writing this dissertation finally comes to an end, a certain number of names come to mind as having been of importance in this long journey. First and foremost, I would like to thank my promotors Frank Veltman and Kees Hengeveld. Frank Veltman gave me the opportunity to be a PhD student under his guidance: for that I cannot thank him enough. I have truly enjoyed and benefited from each of our numerous discussions and his patience and sense of humor have always been a great support. Through our contact I’ve learned that one of the greatest joys of academics is to have the freedom to build your own luchtkastelen. The first two chapters would never have been possible without the help of Kees Hengeveld. With him I discovered the gentle art of reading descriptive grammars and the pleasures of discussing exotic languages. Quite a lot of people helped me with the second chapter of this disserta- tion. Some are teachers, others scholars; some are native speakers, others second- language speakers; some corresponded with me by email, others spent hours re- sponding to my questions in person; I am very much indebted to all of them: Enoch Aboh (Fon), Young-Mee Choi and Sana Song of the Korean School Ams- terdam and Robert Cloutier (Korean), Jan van Eijk and Henry Davis (Lillooet), Margreet Dorleijn (Turkish) and Niko Besnier (Tuvaluan). Writing a dissertation and studying semantics is really gratifying but can sometimes be a lonely business. I have been lucky to be surrounded by many great colleagues always ready for discussion (the second floor of the Philosophy Department is hereby thanked). For the present work, I have greatly benefited from the insights of Rosja Mastop, Katrin Schulz, Paul Dekker, Robert van Rooij and Kai von Fintel. I would like to thank everyone at the ILLC and at the Philosophy Department. ix A particular mention should go to Ingrid van Loon and Dick de Jong for giving me the chance to follow the Master of Logic program at the ILLC, to Michiel van Lambalgen who, to my great pleasure, supervised my Masters thesis and to Tikitu de Jager who took it on himself to proofread this dissertation under great time pressure (of course, he cannot be held responsible for any remaining mistakes). Finally, my sincere gratitude and best wishes go to all the people without whom this dissertation would have been finished a long time ago. Amsterdam Fabrice Nauze July, 2008. x Introduction The overall goal of this dissertation is to study natural language modalities from the perspective of both typology and formal semantics. The idea is to combine the methods and results of both in order to get a better grip on the systematic features of modality. Two important parts of this dissertation thus consist in investigating the no- tional category of modality from a typological perspective, and in using the results of this investigation as input for formal semantics. The typological ap- proach to modality becomes the first step of the research strategy for semantics. Another question that this dissertation will address is whether a formalized se- mantics of modality can provide an explanation for the results of the typological investigation (on top of being an adequate description of these results). Modality is a broad category embracing many different interpretative types that can be expressed by many different constructions. There are surely a lot of directions for research within the typological approach that may deliver fruitful information about the category of modality. One possibility is for instance to classify languages in terms of the type of sys- tem they use to express modality. This is illustrated in the famous (Palmer 2001) where such a distinction is drawn. Some languages express modality through modal systems, others through mood. Palmer (2001) further classifies the cate- gory of modality for both systems. This results in a typology of modality based on crosslinguistic analysis. This path has been successfully followed by among others Palmer (1986), van der Auwera and Plungian (1998), and Hengeveld (2004). Another research program investigates the grammaticalization paths of modal elements as in (Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca 1994) and (van der Auwera and Plungian 1998). These works are characterized by their diachronic perspective. A last example of fruitful investigation within the typological approach is the cross-linguistic study of the interaction of modality with other categories such as tense and aspect, or with operations like negation (de Haan 1997). This dissertation concentrates on modal systems and leans on existing typolo- 1 2 Introduction gies of modality. I therefore take for granted much of the work cited above and will leave the mood category for future work. In contrast to the second suggestion above, this study is synchronic in nature. Finally I will not investigate the inter- action of modality with other categories but focus instead on the combinations of modal items within the category of modality. It is not an uncommon practice in semantics to use typological data, or at least to use some examples from languages other than English in order to investigate some issue. Ad hoc examples are often used to argue for or against a hypothesis within a language. Typically, crosslinguistic data is not used in such situations to make universal claims about how semantics should look.
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