{"id":4877,"date":"2013-03-04T05:02:11","date_gmt":"2013-03-04T09:02:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=4877"},"modified":"2013-03-04T05:03:27","modified_gmt":"2013-03-04T09:03:27","slug":"ling-lunch-37-igor-yanovich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2013\/03\/04\/ling-lunch-37-igor-yanovich\/","title":{"rendered":"Ling-Lunch 3\/7 - Igor Yanovich"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: <a href=\"http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/yanovich\/www\/\">Igor Yanovich<\/a><br clear='none'\/>\nTitle: Variable-force modality on the British Isles<br clear='none'\/>\nDate\/Time: Thursday, Mar 7, 12:30-1:45p<br clear='none'\/>\nLocation: 32-D461<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Recent semantic fieldwork in the Pacific Northwest uncovered modals which may render sometimes English necessity modals, other times English possibility ones without being ambiguous (Rullmann et al. 2008, Peterson 2010, Deal 2011). The analyses for those modals either attribute the peculiar behavior to a radical difference from the &#8220;European standard&#8221; in the semantics of the modal (Rullmann, Matthewson and Davis), or in the shape of the overall modal system (Deal). In this talk, I add to the typology of variable-force modality the Old English <span style=\"font-style:normal\">*motan<\/span> (&gt;modern <span style=\"font-style:normal\">must<\/span>), which is analyzed in the earlier literature as a possibility modals with perhaps marginal necessity uses. Only by the end of the 15th century did the modal become a normal necessity modal it is now.<\/p>\n<p>I show that in Old English &#8216;Alfredian&#8217; prose <span style=\"font-style:normal\">*motan<\/span> was an unambiguous modal carrying a presupposition of determined future which explains the peculiarities of the modal&#8217;s distribution, and creates a variable-force effect. Then I turn to the semantics of the modal in the AB dialect of Early Middle English (a literary variety written in the West Midlands in the first half of 13th century, remarkably focussed for the period of overall decline in English text production). I show that in Early Middle English, <span style=\"font-style:normal\">*moten<\/span> (&lt;<span style=\"font-style:normal\">*motan<\/span>) was truly ambiguous between necessity and possibility. We can thus observe in the history of English a change from a true non-ambiguous variable-force modal, into a modal ambiguous between possibility and necessity, into a normal necessity modal.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: Igor Yanovich Title: Variable-force modality on the British Isles Date\/Time: Thursday, Mar 7, 12:30-1:45p Location: 32-D461 Recent semantic fieldwork in the Pacific Northwest uncovered modals which may render sometimes English necessity modals, other times English possibility ones without being ambiguous (Rullmann et al. 2008, Peterson 2010, Deal 2011). The analyses for those modals either [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4877"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4942,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4877\/revisions\/4942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}