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Saramaccan, Modality, Modal System, Hierarchy of Functional Categories, Layered Structure of Clause 1. Introduction 1

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Saramaccan, Modality, Modal System, Hierarchy of Functional Categories, Layered Structure of Clause 1. Introduction 1 . For about four decades, the syntactic. status of different types of modalities has been a frequently discussed question. Thus, in generative grammar, it was long held that root modals are control structures while epistemic modals constitute instances of subject raising structures. More recently, the position has gained support that root and epistemic modals are generated at different base positions (cf. Barbiers 2002: 7-9). One of the most influential contributions to the recent discussion of modal- ity has come from Cinque (1999). On the basis of cross-linguistic data, Cinque claims the validity of a universal hierarchy of functional projec- tions in which, for example, the following scope1)relationship between 言 語 研 究(GengoKenkyu)128(2005),33～72 33 Mood and the Modal System in Saramaccan* Heiko NARROG (Tohoku University) Key words: Saramaccan, modality,modal system,hierarchy of functional categories,layered structure of clause 1. Introduction 1.1. Goals of this paper * All the data presented in this paper were provided by Rohit Paulus, native of Suriname, and resident of Suisun City, CA, during my stay at UC Berkeley in a period from 8/2001to 1/2002and in later private meetings in Berkeley. I wish to express my deep-felt gratitude to Rohit for his great generosity and patience, and to John McWhorter (currently Manhattan Institute) for generously and selflesslysharing resources with me, including the work in his graduate class on Saramaccan. I am further grateful for the generous comments on previous drafts of the manuscript that I received from John McWhorter and two anony- mous reviewers of this journal, and for the help that I received from Marvin Kramer during the data elicitations. Magnus Wilson (Westminster University) kindly proofread and corrected my English. 1) In this paper, scope is understood as the area over which a functionalcategory 34 Heiko NARROG modal categories holds: evidential > epistemic > irrealis > necessity > possibility > volitional (cf. Cinque 1999: 106; intervening non-modal cat- egories are omitted here). As with formal grammar, in recent theories of functional grammar different types of modality have been assigned to different universal "layers" of the clause. While in Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), a hierarchy is posited in which evidentiality outranks epistemic modality, which in turn outranks root modality (cf. Van Valin and LaPolla 1997: 49), in the standard model of Functional Grammar (FG) a slightly more complex picture is offered. Evidential and "subjec- tive" epistemic modalities are assigned to the same layer, dominating "objective" epistemic and deontic modality, which are located at a lower layer. So-called "inherent" modality (ability etc.) is ranked lowest (cf. Dik 1997:241-2421296).2) Although the three models of grammar mentioned so far have completely different theoretical backgrounds, they share the explicit or implicit assumption that different types of modality have differ- ent scope in the clause, or in other words, occupy different positions in a scope hierarchy of functional categories. On the other hand, despite the burgeoning interest in these scope differences, systematic investigations in this area are still rare, and mostly confined to English, Dutch and German. Cinque (1999) has presented a study with rich cross-linguisticdata, which are, however, not based on rigorous testing in each individual language. Therefore, the validity of his results for specific languages, such as English and Middle Dutch has already been challenged (see Cormack and Smith 2002). Relating his research mainly to the FG and RRG frameworks, Nuyts (2004) has pre- sented a very systematic study for Dutch, based on a corpus of spoken data. Yet, some parts of the study suffer from the limited amount of co- occurrences, which is typical for spoken language data. operates. In the context of the discussion of the present paper, "wider" scope means scope over more functional categories. 2) Henceforth, when referring to RRG and FG, unless stated otherwise, I am referring to the standard models layed out in Van Valin and LaPolla (1997) and Dik (1997). Mood and the Modal System in Saramaccan 35 At this point the present study comes in, aiming to add another piece to the puzzle of cross-linguistic scope behavior of modal categories. The major goal here is to test the hypothesis that different types of modality must be assigned to different layers in a hierarchy of functional categories in the clause, referring to a language which has not figured in this discus- sion yet, namely the Suriname creole Saramaccan. With respect to the theoretical framework, the results will be related to the two functional "sister" frameworks mentioned above , namely FG and RRG.3)Gen- erative theories are excluded here because the diversity of research con- ducted in such frameworks would make a separate theoretical discussion indispensable. In investigating the abovementioned hypothesis, in principle data from any language are equally valuable. However, creoles arguably deserve special attention. It has been repeatedly suggested by creolists that they "... represent a fundamental layer of natural language, unob- scured by the results of millenia of phonological, syntactic, and seman- tic drift that make Universal Grammar a challenge to glean in older languages" (McWhorter 2005: 62). Therefore, they may reflect default settings of Universal Grammar. The creole under investigation here, Saramaccan, is lexically based mainly on English and Portuguese, and thus relatively easily accessible to the general linguist. Saramaccan can be characterized roughly as a language with a grammar resembling West African languages and a European-derived vocabulary. A second, concomitant goal of this study is to provide a descriptive overview of the expression of modality in Saramaccan. Although Sara- maccan is one of the most frequently cited Creole languages, the actual descriptive documentation is sparse, dispersed, and in some cases out- dated. This is also true for the field of modality. Thus, the overview in this 3) These two frameworks are closely related in their development. The idea of layering, which is crucial for distinguishingdifferent types of modality, was in- troduced into FG from RRG (Foley and Van Valin 1984) through Hengeveld in in the late 1980s(Hengeveld 1987,1989). 36 Heiko NARROG paper, although limited, adds to the description of the language 1.2. Modality and modal categories The category of modality can be defined as follows: `Modality is a linguistic category referring to the factual status of a state of affairs. The expression of a state of affairs is modalized if it is marked for being unde- termined with respect to its factual status, i.e. is neither positively nor negatively factual' (Narrog 2005: 184). The traditional sub-categories of deontic and epistemic modality are well-known, at least since Lyons (1977). Dynamic modality, subsuming notions such as volitionality, futurity, external necessity, "neutral" pos- sibility and ability, has been recognized as a third, more marginal modal category (see Palmer 1979). Quite often, particularly in studies of modal- ity in the generative tradition, one finds deontic and dynamic modality subsumed under the label of "root" modality (e.g. Steele 1974, Coates 1983), resulting in a two-way system of modality again. More recently, in some lines of research, evidentiality has been added to the scope of the study of modality. Evidentials qualify the proposition by the kind of evidence that speakers have for their statement (van der Auwera 2003: 71). Some good examples can be found in Japanese where grammatical markers such as -soo (hearsay), and -rasii (appearance, hearsay) express evidential notions. However, there is no agreement yet as to whether evidentiality should not rather be treated as a completely separate category (cf. Aikhenvald 2004: 7),4)or only as a very closely related category (e.g. Nuyts 2001: 27), and, if evidentiality is indeed con- sidered as part of modality, whether epistemic and evidential modality should be regarded as distinct or as forming one category together (e.g. Palmer 2001: 8). Furthermore, one can distinguish "mood" as the most grammatical- ized form of modality which is often expressed as verb inflection, from 4) This point was brought to my attention by an anonymous reviewer. Mood and the Modal System in Saramaccan 37 the rest of modality. Typical moods include imperative, interrogative, subjunctive vs. indicative, optative, and irrealis vs. realis. Palmer, in the newest edition of his textbook on modality (Palmer 2001), has coined a term "modal systems" in contrast to "mood", thus dividing the pie of morphosyntactic expression of the notional category "modality" evenly. Thus, while "mood", as stated above, usually refers to the systematic inflectional formal realization of modality, "modal sys- tems" are realized morphosyntactically more independently as auxiliaries, and partially retain more concrete, lexical meanings. Sometimes scholars make a distinction between subjective and objec- tive modality. According to Lyons, the sentence in example (1) can be interpreted either objectively ("Relative to what is known, it is possible that he will not come"), or subjectively, that is as an expression of the speaker's belief ("I think it possible that he will not come") (Lyons 1995: 329f): (1) He may not come. (Lyons 1995:329) In the present paper, the main distinction is made between root, epis- temic, and evidential modality. In Saramaccan, we also find some mood marking. The different realizations of modal notions as a whole will be referred to as "modal markers" irrespective of their morphosyntactic properties. 1.3. The language and the data According to the Ethnologue, Saramaccan is a creole language mainly in Suriname spoken by a population of about 23,000 (Grimes 2000). Its most important lexifier languages are English and Portuguese, contributing to about a half and a third of the vocabulary, respectively. The rest of the vocabulary is mainly shared between words of Dutch and African origin (cf. Arends 2002: 117f, Bruyn 2002: 160-168).
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