Modality at work

Lisbon 10-11 september 2009

Modal verbs, modal adverbs and modal particles in English, German and Dutch. What markers of epistemic necessity and inferential evidentiality might express Tanja Mortelmans University of Antwerp. In Mortelmans (fortc.), the occurrences of the English modal verb must in Nicci Frenchs The memory game are compared with their translations in both Dutch and German. At the same time, the occurrences of the modal verbs moeten (Dutch) and mssen (German) some of which do not correspond to must in the English original, are looked at. One of the striking observations pertains to the fact that Dutch moeten pops up much more frequently than both mssen and must, especially (and not entirely unexpectedly) in dynamic and deontic (i.e. non-epistemic) contexts. Whereas the English original contains only 38 occurrences of must, the German translation of the English text contains 84 occurrences of mssen, and the Dutch translation of the same text no less than 155 occurrences of moeten. As far as evidentialepistemic occurrences are concerned, however, the English modal must is translated by mssen viz. moeten in only one third of the cases. Dutch prefers either another modal verb (the modal zullen, typically in combination with the modal particle wel) or modal adverbs (vast, waarschijnlijk), whereas German translates epistemic must most often by means of modal adverbs (without a modal verb): bestimmt (surely), sicher (surely), offenbar (apparently) and offensichtlich (apparently), as in the following example. ENG DU GER I havent seen Granny and Grandpa. They must be up in their room. Die zullen wel op hun kamer zitten. Sie sind bestimmt oben in ihrem Zimmer.

Interestingly, English must most often occurs in dialogic situations (in 29 out of the 38 cases in the corpus), i.e. in contexts of direct speech, as in the example above. Moreover, in a number of cases, epistemic must seems to serve intersubjective (in the sense of Traugott (2003: 128)) purposes: it expresses the speakers attention to the self of the addressee, as in the following example, in which the sympathetic you must be exhausted contributes to the attempts of the speaker to convince the addressee of doing something extra. Typically, neither German nor Dutch code this must by means of the corresponding modal verb. ENG DUT GER Jane, were almost finished and I know you must be exhausted but Id like us to try something. Jane, we moeten er bijna mee ophouden, en ik weet dat je doodmoe bent, maar ik wou graag dat wij eens iets probeerden. Jane, die Zeit ist fast um, und bestimmt sind Sie erschpft, aber ich mchte trotzdem noch etwas ausprobieren.

In my contribution to the workshop, I want to focus on the means that German (and to a lesser extent) Dutch use to convey interactional meanings that can be associated with epistemic and evidential (inferential) necessity. Apparently, German makes less use of epistemic mssen which is considerably less grammaticalized than its English counterpart -, but seems to turn to modal adverbs (e.g. sicher, gewiss) nd modal particles (the latter are conspicuously absent in the (written) material already looked at). A likely candidate here would be the modal particle wohl (see e.g. Gast 2008; Zimmermann 2004). Both modal particles and epistemic adverbs are much more often used in combination with the auxiliary werden than with mssen (which has already been observed in Ulvestad 1984). Because of the contrastive
Societas Linguistica Europaea 2009

Modality at work

Lisbon 10-11 september 2009

perspective, the analysis will not draw on original spoken material, but on a comparison of written to be spoken material, in casu theatre plays, from German to English and vice versa. References Coates, Jennifer (1987). Epistemic modality and spoken discourse. Transactions of the philological Society, 110-131 Gast, Volker (2008). Modal particles and context updating - the functions of German ja, doch, wohl and etwa. In: H. Vater & O. Letnes (eds.), Modalverben und Grammatikalisierung. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 153-177. Mortelmans, Tanja (forthc.) Falsche Freunde: Warum sich die Modalverben must, mssen und moeten nicht entsprechen. In: Andrzej Ktny & Anna Socka (eds.), Modalitt/Temporalitt in kontrastiver und typologischer Sicht. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang. Traugott, Elisabeth Closs (2003). From subjectification to intersubjectification. In: Hickey, Raymond (ed.), Motives for Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 124-139. Ulvestad, Bjarne (1984). Die epistemischen Modalverben werden und mssen in pragmalinguistischer Sicht. Pragmatik in der Grammatik. Jahrbuch 1983 des Instituts fr deutsche Sprache ed. by Gerhard Stickel. Dsseldorf: Schwann, 262 -293. Zimmermann, Malte (2004). Zum Wohl: Diskurspartikeln als Satztypmodifikatoren. Linguistische Berichte 253-286.

Societas Linguistica Europaea 2009