Evaluación Formativa. Instrumentos de la evaluación formativa. Herramientas

Among non-prototypical deontic sentences with must are general ob- jective expressions like (16) meaning “it is necessary for X to do/be Y”:

(16) The simple truth is that if you’re going to boil eggs communally they must be hard. “it is necessary for the cook to boil eggs hard”

(Warner 1993: 14) Similarly, there are generalized must-expressions that are epistemic, like (17) mean- ing “the only possible conclusion is that/it can’t not be that”:

(17) All scientific results must depend on a rather specialized form of history. “scientific results can’t not depend”

(Palmer 1990 [1979]: 32) In the realm of modal possibility examples such as (18) have been shown to have both deontic and epistemic readings:

(18) or the pollen may be taken from the stamens of one rose and transferred to the stigma of another.

a. “it’s possible for the pollen to be taken” (root) b. “it’s possible that the pollen will be taken” (epistemic)

In these kinds of general modal statements, the source of authority is usually un- specified (Warner 1993: 15); it is always external. We call these general root/deontic necessity (16) and possibility (18a) and general epistemic necessity (17) and possi- bility (18b).4_{Root/deontic necessity comes close to the kind of necessity logicians}

have in mind when they speak of deontics as being “alethic” (involving “necessary truths” about some possible world); however, the conditions for the necessity and possibility need not be universally quantified as in alethic modality.

Coates has pointed out that the polysemy between root and epistemic possibility such as is illustrated by (18) is often “problematic” (i.e. undecidable), especially in writing, and has suggested that there is a “merger” of the two in many instances: “instead of having to choose one meaning and discard the other (as with ambiguous examples), the hearer is able to process both meanings” (Coates 1995: 61; italics original). By contrast, she suggests that the polysemy between root and epistemic necessity is “unproblematic” (Coates 1995: 56). However, in earlier work she cites (19), which appears to be as undecidable as (18):

(19) and anyway I think mental health is a very relative thing – I mean, mental health must be related to the sort of general mentality or whatever other word you use of the community you’re living in.

(Coates 1983: 47; she paraphrases these as “it’s essential that mental health is related to. . .” (root) or “it’s inevitably the case that mental health is related to. . .” (epistemic)5₎

General root/deontic possibility and necessity appear to have been pivotal in the development of modal meanings in English (see Bybee 1988, Nordlinger and Trau- gott 1997, Goossens 2000). In each case the earlier modal was underspecified with respect to distinctions between possibility and necessity or deontic and epistemic readings.

3.2.4 Scope

An issue of some debate in modality is “scope,” or range over which the modal applies. A distinction between narrow and wide semantic scope goes back to the Stoics. Narrow scope applies only to a subpart of the proposition, while wide scope applies to the whole proposition. In recent years scope has been discussed

4_{Not all authors require such constructions to be general, although they require some evidence} that general conditions apply, e.g. Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca define “root possibility” as modal expressions which report “on general enabling conditions” (1994: 178), but cite a very particu- larized example with could: I actually couldn’t finish reading it because the chap whose shoulder I was reading the book over got out at Leicester Square (from Coates 1983: 114).

5_{Intonational diacritics have been removed. Coates uses “or.” However, “+>” would be more} consistent with our view.

primarily in connection with adverbs (e.g. Jackendoff 1972), negation, quantifiers, and modals (e.g. Horn 1972, 1984, 1989). An example in the domain of negation is the ambiguity in:

(20) All the girl scouts didn’t attend. This can be understood as:

(21) a. Some of the girl scouts attended, but not all. [girl scouts, attended (NOT all)] (narrow scope)

b. None of the girl scouts attended. [NOT (all girl scouts, attended)] (wide scope) A similar scope distinction can be seen in:

(22) a. She ran happily. (narrow scope; happily modifies the verb ran, and is subject-oriented: “She was happy.”)

b. Happily, she ran. (wide scope; happily modifies the proposition she ran, and

is speaker-oriented: “I am happy to say she ran.”)

A correlation has sometimes been made between deontics and narrow scope on the one hand and epistemics and wide scope on the other (e.g. Bybee 1988). How- ever, general root/deontic necessity and general root/deontic possibility expressions involve wide scope (Nordlinger and Traugott 1997). Thus deontic must in (10) has narrow scope over the agent you, whereas deontic necessity must in (16) has wide scope. They are repeated here with a scope analysis:

(23) a. “You must play this ten times over,” Miss Jarrova would say. [(MUST you) play this] (narrow scope “it is required of you you play this”)

b. The simple truth is that if you’re going to boil eggs communally they must be hard. [MUST(eggs be hard)] (wide scope “it is required, eggs boil till hard”) In 3.4.1 we will show that the development of wide scope root/deontic necessity meanings is one factor that enabled the development of epistemic meanings, in other words, wide scope deontic uses developed before epistemic meanings became semanticized.

3.2.5 (Inter)subjectivity

Sometimes narrow vs. wide scope appears to be conflated with low vs. high subjectivity (see e.g. Palmer 1986, Gamon 1994). Subjectivity is, however, not the same as scope (Nordlinger and Traugott 1997). Modals, whether deontic or epistemic, can express more or less subjective viewpoints depending on the extent to which they represent the attitudes, opinions, or conclusions of the speaker (Lyons 1977: 797ff.).

Although logicians have long been concerned with objective necessity and pos- sibility, in natural languages modality is strongly bound up with subjectivity. For example, building on Lyons (1977: 452), Palmer proposed that: “Modality in lan- guage is. . . concerned with subjective characteristics of an utterance, and it could even be further argued that subjectivity is an essential criterion for modality” (Palmer 1986: 16). But as his use in this quotation of the modal could implies, Palmer cau- tions that not all modal utterances are subjective. You must leave at once could be a subjective insistence by the speaker or a general (relatively objective) comment on an inescapable state of affairs over which neither speaker nor addressee has any control (ibid. p. 17). Some linguistic deontics do express universal truths (at least as construed by speakers), e.g. All men must die, and, as we have seen, deontic ne- cessity and possibility can concern general conditions. Furthermore, the modality of ability is not subjective (Hoye 1997: 43), and there is a considerable conceptual distance between weakly subjective modals that appeal to norms and regularities and strongly subjective epistemic modals that are based solely on the speaker’s opin- ions and beliefs. Finally, even epistemics that are based in speaker judgment rather than general truths can range from less to more subjective. Sanders and Spooren (1996), for example, suggest a complex cline for epistemic subjectivity in Dutch based on two kinds of evidence: knowledge-based and observation-based. Later in this chapter we will see how meanings have become increasingly subjective over the history of both deontic and epistemic must and ought to.

With respect to deontics, there is a cline of subjectivity from objective (the source of obligation is universal) to subjective (the source of obligation is the speaker). According to Myhill there is in addition what in our terms is an intersubjective use of many deontic modals that deserves attention. Basing his studies (1995, 1996, 1997) on dialog in late nineteenth and twentieth century American plays, he suggests that there is a set of “group-oriented” uses of modals which can be used “as a rhetorical device to try to convince the listener that there really is general agreement from other people, so that the listener ought to agree” (Myhill 1997: 9). He argues that this intersubjective meaning is often associated with ought to in the plays, whereas

should is associated with individual, subjective opinions. For example, although the

uses of ought to and should might on first thought appear to be interchangeable in (24), they actually reflect acknowledgment of the interlocutor and agreement that the Far East is “where everything’s happening” in the first case and a subjective opinion on a different matter, in the second:

(24) Norman: Are you doing anything relevant?

Dick: You can’t get more relevant than Far Eastern studies. Ask me anything about the Far East and I’ll tell you the answer. That’s where everything’s happening. China, Vietnam, Japan, Korea. You name it.

Norman: I guess I ought to know more about those things. I don’t know, I keep thinking there’s a lot of things I should know about.

(1970, Weller p. 131 [Myhill 1997: 3]) Myhill suggests that during the twentieth century, at least as evidenced by plays, there has been a shift away from “group-oriented” (intersubjective) uses of the modals like must, ought to, and intentional will, to more individualized uses of modals like got to, should, and gonna. The tendency Myhill observes in American English is borne out by statistics on use of have got to/gotta in spoken contemporary British English. Krug (2000) found that these forms were one and a half times more frequent than must in the British National Corpus despite prescriptive warnings against them. To what extent these shifts are a function of particular ideologies expressed in plays, or of social changes as a whole remains to be determined. In any event they are shifts in norms of use rather than semasiological shifts in the meanings of individual modals and are subject to different motivations from those that are the focus of this book.

A particular kind of (inter)subjectivity may be associated with epistemics, espe- cially may and can. For example,

(25) She may jog.

can mean not only that she is permitted to jog (deontic: something a doctor might say at some point after surgery) or that it is possible that she will run (epistemic: something a coach might say about a team member who is on the list of potential runners), but also:

(26) I acknowledge that she jogs.

The type paraphrased in (26) seem to be restricted to complex clause constructions, such as:

(27) She may jog, but she sure looks unhealthy to me.

Here the first clause is concessive and presupposes that the interlocutor or some- one has said that she runs (“although she may jog, as you say. . .”). The speaker grudgingly accepts this, and then goes on to draw some conclusion that does not directly follow from the modalized proposition. Pointing out that it may be used metatextually to relativize the form of the communicative act itself, Sweetser (1990) calls the type of modal use in (27) the “speech act” use (see 2.3.1). To what extent speech act uses of modals are cross-linguistic is not clear at this point. Nor does the textual evidence give precise insight into what historical path individual modals have undergone to reach this stage. However, by hypothesis, since the metatextual meanings are the most (inter)subjective, they are probably the latest to develop

semasiologically. Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca (1994: 240) treat concessive mean- ings in general as later stages of modality. This is echoed by Van de Auwera and Plungian, who cite Dutch mag “may” in a speech act/concessive sense, pointing out that in Dutch mogen “does not have any epistemic meaning (any more)” (1998: 93). Furthermore, as we shall see in the chapter on discourse markers, sentence adverbs that have adversative epistemic meanings give rise to metatextual discourse marker meaning, not vice versa.

3.2.6 Temporality

Prototypical agentive deontics involve an event that is projected or obligated to occur later than reference time. Therefore the reference time of You

must/may leave is future of the time of utterance. By contrast, prototypical epis-

temics have present time reference. (28) They must be reconciled.

is future-oriented in its deontic meaning (obligation), but present (utterance-time)- oriented in the epistemic meaning. However, the correlations are far from uni- form. In English, general root/deontic necessity as in (18) has generic present as its reference time. And epistemicity can be future-oriented as in the case of proba- bility:

(29) The storm should be clear by tomorrow. (Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994: 180)

It has often been noted that historically, deontics often give rise to futures (e.g. Fleischman 1982, Bybee, Pagliuca, and Perkins 1991). They are most likely to do so if they have agent-oriented meaning, such as “desire” or “obligation.” A prototype example in work on grammaticalization is the development of Late Lat.

cantare habeo “sing-INF have-1stSg” > Fr. chanterai “I will sing.” Here hab- “have”

acquires an obligation meaning and subsequently comes to serve as the future suffix (for various approaches see Benveniste 1968, Fleischman 1982, Pinkster 1987).

Past reference time is available for epistemics. In English it is usually expressed by have + past participle following the modal as in:

(30) They must have been reconciled.

Here the speaker’s subjective viewpoint is from the present, but the reference time is prior to the time of utterance. (30) cannot be deontic. There is, however, a lexically differentiated deontic of obligation must with past reference:

Deontic Epistemic Stronger must must Weaker have (got) to ought to have (got) to ought to

Figure 3.1. Relative modal strengths of must, have (got) to, ought to (based on Coates 1983: 19, 26, 31).

(31) They had to be reconciled.6

The had to modal is less subjective in the sense that the source of obligation is much less likely to be SP/W than in the case of deontic must. Since the speaker cannot be the source of the compulsion in a past tense deontic, the less subjective equivalent is used to express past reference.