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.
Realisation in speech
- (a) grammatically: through
- modal verbs (e.g., English: may, might, must; German: sollen: Er soll ein guter Schachspieler sein "He is said to be a good chess player"),
- particular grammatical moods on verbs, the epistemic moods, or
- a specific grammatical element, such as an affix (Tuyuca: -hīyi "reasonable to assume") or particle; or
- (b) non-grammatically (often lexically): through
- adverbials (e.g., English: perhaps, possibly), or
- a certain intonational pattern
Non-canonical environments and objective epistemic modality
In 1977, John Lyons started a long discussion regarding in which environments epistemic modal operators can be embedded and from which environments they are banned. He argues that epistemic modal operators compete for the same position as illocutionary operators, such as the assertion operator, question operator or imperative operator. According to him this explains why most epistemic modals in English are not acceptable embedded under questions or negation.
As Lyons finds single lexemes of epistemic modals in English that are used in questions and under negation, he assumes that they must be part of a separate class of epistemic modality–the so called objective epistemic modality, in contrast to subjective epistemic modality—whose operators are considered to be taking the same position in the clause as illocutionary operators.
Which modal lexemes convey an `objective' epistemic interpretation is subject to much controversy. So far most of the authors who are in favour of a distinct class of objective epistemic modal verbs have not explicitly stated which verbs can be interpreted in an `objective' epistemic way and which can only be interpreted in an `subjective' epistemic way.
It is often assumed that, for languages such as English, Hungarian, Dutch and German, epistemic adverbs only involve a subjective epistemic interpretation and can never be interpreted in an objective epistemic way.
Since the publication of Lyons' work, a range of environments have been suggested from which (subjective) epistemic modals are assumed to be banned. Most of these non-canonical environments were motivated by data from English:
- No infinitives
- No past participles
- No past tenses
- Excluded from the scope of a counterfactual operator
- Excluded from nominalisations
- No verbless directional phrase complements
- No VP-anaphora
- No separation in wh-clefts
- May not bear sentence accent
- Excluded from the scope of an negation
- Excluded from polar questions
- Excluded from wh-questions
- Excluded from imperatives
- Excluded from optatives
- Excluded from complement clauses
- Excluded from event-related causal clauses
- Excluded from the antecedent of an event related conditional clause
- Excluded from temporal clauses
- Excluded from restrictive relative clauses
- Excluded from the scope of a quantifier
- No assent/dissent
However, taking a look into languages which have a more productive inflectional morphology such as German, there is solid corpus data that epistemic modal verbs do occur in many of these environments. The only environments in which epistemic modal verbs do not occur in German are as follows.
- they do not occur with verbless directional phrase complements
- they cannot be separated from their infinitive complements in wh-clefts
- they do not undergo nominalisations
- they are exempt from adverbial infinitives
- they cannot be embedded under circumstantial modal verbs
- they cannot be embedded under predicates of desire
- they cannot be embedded under imperative operators
- they cannot be embedded under optative operators
This corpus data further shows that there is no consistent class of objective epistemic modal verbs, neither in English, nor in German. Each of the assumed objective epistemic modals is acceptable in a different range of environments which are actually supposed to hold for the entire stipulated class of objective epistemic modality.
The table below illustrates in which environments the most frequent epistemic modals in German, kann `can', muss `must', dürfte `be.probable', mögen `may' are attested in corpora (yes), or yield ungrammatical judgements (no). The lower part makes reference to classifications by various authors, which of these epistemic modal verb come with an objective epistemic interpretation and which are only restricted to subjective epistemic modality.
| environment | kann `can' (very rare) | muss `must' | dürfte `be.probable' | könnte `could' | mögen `might' (rare) | epistemic Adverbs | particle wohl `perhaps' |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| factive complement clause | ? | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | ? |
| causal clause | ? | yes | yes | yes | yes | ? | yes |
| temporal clause | ? | yes | yes | yes | ? | ? | yes |
| event related conditional clause | no | no | ? | yes | no | ? | no |
| negation | yes | yes | no | no | no | no | no |
| information seeking questions | yes | no | yes | yes | no | ? | yes |
| quantifiers | yes | no | no | yes | no | no | |
| infinitive | yes | yes | no | ? | ? | ||
| Öhlschläger (1989:207), German | objective, subjective | objective, subjective | objective, subjective | only subjective | |||
| Diewald (1999:82–84,274), German | objective, subjective | objective, subjective | only subjective | only subjective | |||
| Huitink (2008a), Dutch | objective, subjective | objective, subjective |
Link to evidentiality
Many linguists have considered possible links between epistemic modality and evidentiality, the grammatical marking of a speaker's evidence or information source. However, there is no consensus about what such a link consists of. Some work takes epistemic modality as a starting point and tries to explain evidentiality as a subtype. Others work in the other direction, attempting to reduce epistemic modality to evidentiality. Still others recognize epistemic modality and evidentiality as two fundamentally separate categories, and posit that particular lexical items may have both an epistemic and an evidential component to their meanings. However, other linguists feel that evidentiality is distinct from and not necessarily related to modality. Some languages mark evidentiality separately from epistemic modality.
See also
- Alethic modality
- Epistemic logic
- Epistemology
- Free choice inference
- Hedge (linguistics)
- Dynamic semantics
Notes
- Roseano, Paolo; González, Montserrat; Borràs-Comes, Joan; Prieto, Pilar (2016). "Communicating Epistemic Stance: How Speech and Gesture Patterns Reflect Epistemicity and Evidentiality". Discourse Processes. 53 (3): 135–174. doi:10.1080/0163853X.2014.969137. hdl:10230/27949. S2CID 3525644.
- Lyons 1977, cf. references
- Lyons (1977:798)
- Watts (1984:139)
- Kiefer (1984: 69)
- Öhlschläger (1989: 212)
- Diewald (1999: 84)
- Tancredi (2007: Sect. 1 and Sect. 10)
- Nuyts (2001a: 389)
- Cf. Maché 2013 for an extensive historical overview and discussion.
- Hacquard/Welwood 2012
- Maché 2013
- Cf. Table from Maché 2013:375
- Loos, Eugene E.; Anderson, Susan; Day, Dwight H. Jr.; Jordan, Paul C.; Wingate, J. Douglas (eds.). "What is epistemic modality?". Glossary of linguistic terms. SIL International. Retrieved 2009-12-28.
- De Haan, pp. 56–59, and references therein.
References
- Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (2004). Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-926388-4.
- Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.; & Dixon, R. M. W. (Eds.). (2003). Studies in evidentiality. Typological studies in language (Vol. 54). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISBN 90-272-2962-7; ISBN 1-58811-344-2.
- Blakemore, D. (1994). Evidence and modality. In R. E. Asher (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (pp. 1183–1186). Oxford: Pergamon Press. ISBN 0-08-035943-4.
- De Haan, F. (2006). Typological approaches to modality. In W. Frawley (Ed.), The Expression of Modality (pp. 27–69). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Diewald, Gabriele. 1999. Die Modalverben im Deutschen: Grammatikalisierung und Polyfunktionalität. Reihe Germanistische Linguistik, No. 208, Tübingen: Niemeyer.
- Hacquard, Valentine and Wellwood, Alexis: Embedding epistemic modals in English. A corpus-based study. In Semantics & Pragmatics 5(4), pp. 1–29 http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.4
- Kiefer, Ferenc. 1984. Focus and modality. Groninger Abreiten zur Germanistischen Linguistik 24, 55–81.
- Kiefer, Ferenc. (1986). Epistemic possibility and focus. In W. Abraham & S. de Meij (Eds.), Topic, focus, and configurationality. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
- Kiefer, Ferenc. (1994). Modality. In R. E. Asher (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (pp. 2515–2520). Oxford: Pergamon Press. ISBN 0-08-035943-4.
- Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics, volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- Maché, Jakob 2013: On Black Magic -- How epistemic modifiers emerge. Phd-Thesis. Freie Universität Berlin.
- Nuyts, J. (2001). Epistemic modality, language, and conceptualization: A cognitive-pragmatic perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
- Nuyts, Jan. 2001b. Subjectivity as an evidential dimension in epistemic modal expression. Journal of Pragmatics 33(3), 383–400.
- Öhlschläger, Günther. 1989. Zur Syntax und Semantik der Modalverben, volume 144 of Linguistische Arbeiten. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
- Palmer, F. R. (1979). Modality and the English modals. London: Longman.
- Palmer, F. R. (1986). Mood and modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-26516-9, ISBN 0-521-31930-7.
- Palmer, F. R. (2001). Mood and modality (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-80035-8, ISBN 0-521-80479-5.
- Palmer, F. R. (1994). Mood and modality. In R. E. Asher (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (pp. 2535–2540). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
- Saeed, John I. (2003). Sentence semantics 1: Situations: Modality and evidentiality. In J. I Saeed, Semantics (2nd. ed) (Sec. 5.3, pp. 135–143). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 0-631-22692-3, ISBN 0-631-22693-1.
- Tancredi, Christopher. 2007. A Multi-Model Modal Theory of I-Semantics. Part I: Modals. Ms. University of Tokyo.
- Watts, Richard J. 1984. An analysis of epistemic possibility and probability. English Studies 65(2), 129–140.
External links
- Modality and Evidentiality
- SIL: mood and modality
- SIL: epistemic modality
- SIL: judgment modality: (assumptive mood, declarative mood, deductive mood, dubitative mood, hypothetical mood, interrogative mood, speculative mood)
- SIL: evidentiality
- modality in a machine-translation interlingua
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 Realisation in speech a grammatically through modal verbs e g English may might must German sollen Er soll ein guter Schachspieler sein He is said to be a good chess player particular grammatical moods on verbs the epistemic moods or a specific grammatical element such as an affix Tuyuca hiyi reasonable to assume or particle or b non grammatically often lexically through adverbials e g English perhaps possibly or a certain intonational patternNon canonical environments and objective epistemic modalityIn 1977 John Lyons started a long discussion regarding in which environments epistemic modal operators can be embedded and from which environments they are banned He argues that epistemic modal operators compete for the same position as illocutionary operators such as the assertion operator question operator or imperative operator According to him this explains why most epistemic modals in English are not acceptable embedded under questions or negation As Lyons finds single lexemes of epistemic modals in English that are used in questions and under negation he assumes that they must be part of a separate class of epistemic modality the so called objective epistemic modality in contrast to subjective epistemic modality whose operators are considered to be taking the same position in the clause as illocutionary operators Which modal lexemes convey an objective epistemic interpretation is subject to much controversy So far most of the authors who are in favour of a distinct class of objective epistemic modal verbs have not explicitly stated which verbs can be interpreted in an objective epistemic way and which can only be interpreted in an subjective epistemic way It is often assumed that for languages such as English Hungarian Dutch and German epistemic adverbs only involve a subjective epistemic interpretation and can never be interpreted in an objective epistemic way Since the publication of Lyons work a range of environments have been suggested from which subjective epistemic modals are assumed to be banned Most of these non canonical environments were motivated by data from English No infinitives No past participles No past tenses Excluded from the scope of a counterfactual operator Excluded from nominalisations No verbless directional phrase complements No VP anaphora No separation in wh clefts May not bear sentence accent Excluded from the scope of an negation Excluded from polar questions Excluded from wh questions Excluded from imperatives Excluded from optatives Excluded from complement clauses Excluded from event related causal clauses Excluded from the antecedent of an event related conditional clause Excluded from temporal clauses Excluded from restrictive relative clauses Excluded from the scope of a quantifier No assent dissent However taking a look into languages which have a more productive inflectional morphology such as German there is solid corpus data that epistemic modal verbs do occur in many of these environments The only environments in which epistemic modal verbs do not occur in German are as follows they do not occur with verbless directional phrase complements they cannot be separated from their infinitive complements in wh clefts they do not undergo nominalisations they are exempt from adverbial infinitives they cannot be embedded under circumstantial modal verbs they cannot be embedded under predicates of desire they cannot be embedded under imperative operators they cannot be embedded under optative operators This corpus data further shows that there is no consistent class of objective epistemic modal verbs neither in English nor in German Each of the assumed objective epistemic modals is acceptable in a different range of environments which are actually supposed to hold for the entire stipulated class of objective epistemic modality The table below illustrates in which environments the most frequent epistemic modals in German kann can muss must durfte be probable mogen may are attested in corpora yes or yield ungrammatical judgements no The lower part makes reference to classifications by various authors which of these epistemic modal verb come with an objective epistemic interpretation and which are only restricted to subjective epistemic modality German epistemic modal verbs in non canonical environments environment kann can very rare muss must durfte be probable konnte could mogen might rare epistemic Adverbs particle wohl perhaps factive complement clause yes yes yes yes yes causal clause yes yes yes yes yestemporal clause yes yes yes yesevent related conditional clause no no yes no nonegation yes yes no no no no noinformation seeking questions yes no yes yes no yesquantifiers yes no no yes no noinfinitive yes yes no Ohlschlager 1989 207 German objective subjective objective subjective objective subjective only subjectiveDiewald 1999 82 84 274 German objective subjective objective subjective only subjective only subjectiveHuitink 2008a Dutch objective subjective objective subjectiveLink to evidentialityMany linguists have considered possible links between epistemic modality and evidentiality the grammatical marking of a speaker s evidence or information source However there is no consensus about what such a link consists of Some work takes epistemic modality as a starting point and tries to explain evidentiality as a subtype Others work in the other direction attempting to reduce epistemic modality to evidentiality Still others recognize epistemic modality and evidentiality as two fundamentally separate categories and posit that particular lexical items may have both an epistemic and an evidential component to their meanings However other linguists feel that evidentiality is distinct from and not necessarily related to modality Some languages mark evidentiality separately from epistemic modality See alsoAlethic modality Epistemic logic Epistemology Free choice inference Hedge linguistics Dynamic semanticsNotesRoseano Paolo Gonzalez Montserrat Borras Comes Joan Prieto Pilar 2016 Communicating Epistemic Stance How Speech and Gesture Patterns Reflect Epistemicity and Evidentiality Discourse Processes 53 3 135 174 doi 10 1080 0163853X 2014 969137 hdl 10230 27949 S2CID 3525644 Lyons 1977 cf references Lyons 1977 798 Watts 1984 139 Kiefer 1984 69 Ohlschlager 1989 212 Diewald 1999 84 Tancredi 2007 Sect 1 and Sect 10 Nuyts 2001a 389 Cf Mache 2013 for an extensive historical overview and discussion Hacquard Welwood 2012 Mache 2013 Cf Table from Mache 2013 375 Loos Eugene E Anderson Susan Day Dwight H Jr Jordan Paul C Wingate J Douglas eds What is epistemic modality Glossary of linguistic terms SIL International Retrieved 2009 12 28 De Haan pp 56 59 and references therein ReferencesAikhenvald Alexandra Y 2004 Evidentiality Oxford Oxford University Press ISBN 0 19 926388 4 Aikhenvald Alexandra Y amp Dixon R M W Eds 2003 Studies in evidentiality Typological studies in language Vol 54 Amsterdam John Benjamins Publishing Company ISBN 90 272 2962 7 ISBN 1 58811 344 2 Blakemore D 1994 Evidence and modality In R E Asher Ed The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics pp 1183 1186 Oxford Pergamon Press ISBN 0 08 035943 4 De Haan F 2006 Typological approaches to modality In W Frawley Ed The Expression of Modality pp 27 69 Berlin Mouton de Gruyter Diewald Gabriele 1999 Die Modalverben im Deutschen Grammatikalisierung und Polyfunktionalitat Reihe Germanistische Linguistik No 208 Tubingen Niemeyer Hacquard Valentine and Wellwood Alexis Embedding epistemic modals in English A corpus based study In Semantics amp Pragmatics 5 4 pp 1 29 http dx doi org 10 3765 sp 5 4 Kiefer Ferenc 1984 Focus and modality Groninger Abreiten zur Germanistischen Linguistik 24 55 81 Kiefer Ferenc 1986 Epistemic possibility and focus In W Abraham amp S de Meij Eds Topic focus and configurationality Amsterdam Benjamins Kiefer Ferenc 1994 Modality In R E Asher Ed The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics pp 2515 2520 Oxford Pergamon Press ISBN 0 08 035943 4 Lyons John 1977 Semantics volume 2 Cambridge Cambridge University Press Mache Jakob 2013 On Black Magic How epistemic modifiers emerge Phd Thesis Freie Universitat Berlin Nuyts J 2001 Epistemic modality language and conceptualization A cognitive pragmatic perspective Amsterdam John Benjamins Publishing Company Nuyts Jan 2001b Subjectivity as an evidential dimension in epistemic modal expression Journal of Pragmatics 33 3 383 400 Ohlschlager Gunther 1989 Zur Syntax und Semantik der Modalverben volume 144 of Linguistische Arbeiten Tubingen Niemeyer Palmer F R 1979 Modality and the English modals London Longman Palmer F R 1986 Mood and modality Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 0 521 26516 9 ISBN 0 521 31930 7 Palmer F R 2001 Mood and modality 2nd ed Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 0 521 80035 8 ISBN 0 521 80479 5 Palmer F R 1994 Mood and modality In R E Asher Ed The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics pp 2535 2540 Oxford Pergamon Press Saeed John I 2003 Sentence semantics 1 Situations Modality and evidentiality In J I Saeed Semantics 2nd ed Sec 5 3 pp 135 143 Malden MA Blackwell Publishing ISBN 0 631 22692 3 ISBN 0 631 22693 1 Tancredi Christopher 2007 A Multi Model Modal Theory of I Semantics Part I Modals Ms University of Tokyo Watts Richard J 1984 An analysis of epistemic possibility and probability English Studies 65 2 129 140 External linksModality and Evidentiality SIL mood and modality SIL epistemic modality SIL judgment modality assumptive mood declarative mood deductive mood dubitative mood hypothetical mood interrogative mood speculative mood SIL evidentiality modality in a machine translation interlingua
