Peter,
Modals and tense have been an issue over the years and I have been in 
the middle of some of those conversations. I have also moved on from 
earlier positions, so I will try out a couple of observations here.
I think the modals are a great way to demonstrate the process of 
grammaticalization since, as Herb points out, we can pretty much trace 
them back to a time when they acted more or less like ordinary verbs and 
not as auxiliaries. It’s also a way to look at grammar as EMERGENT, not 
innate and fixed, but dynamic and evolving. We can see that there is not 
a hard and fast separation between the lexicon and the grammar. These 
are core principles of cognitive approaches to grammar.
Tense and aspect give us a way to ground a statement in historical time. 
I won’t go into big detail on that except to say it has to do not just 
with past and present, but with whether an action is completed, ongoing, 
recurrent, and so on. The modals add meanings about the attitude or 
judgment of the speaker. I think deontic and epistemic are very rough 
classifications and don’t do full justice to the highly nuanced meanings 
involved or the highly nuanced ways in which time factors in. A 
scientist may want to qualify a statement about, say, global warning, by 
saying we COULD have some results, SHOULD expect others, and so on. 
These same qualifications can be made about past or ongoing events. "She 
should be on her way right now." "It might have been him all along." It 
adds information about the speaker’s judgment of likelihood. We also 
have the possibility of adding judgments about ability, desirability, 
obligation, and so on. We MUST act. We CAN make a difference. I think 
sometimes we have a tendency to describe formal rules, classify the 
constructions, and pull further and further away from the nuances of 
meaning that matter most. The modals are messy because they are hard to 
classify, but this gives us a range of meaning options that would not 
otherwise be available.
We also have a number of periphrastic forms that can be classified as 
modals, and these seem to add options by being capable of shifting tense 
and capable of combining with each other. We don’t normally say “We 
should can”, but we can say “we should be able to.” We can also say “I 
was able to” or “I was supposed to” or even “I was supposed to be able 
to”, adding tense shifts and multiple meanings that are not available 
for the core modals.
I was researching ESL grammars recently and ran into “be going to” as a 
future auxiliary. I’m not sure I like “future auxiliary” as a category, 
but it has evolved a role very similar to “will.” “I will study hard for 
the test.” “I am going to study hard for the test.” It’s interesting 
that we can come up with a past tense version, something we can’t do 
with “will.” “I was going to study hard for the test.” We can see an 
historical addition of meaning, from “I am going to the store” 
(travelling) to “I am going to shop” (probably starting as “going to a 
place where I can shop” and then becoming “I intend to shop”), and 
finally something like “It is going to rain,” meaning I am predicting 
that it will happen with some certainty. It may be that adding the 
possibility of tense shift makes it more flexible than “will”. “I was 
going to rake the leaves, but I couldn’t find the rake.” "Was going to" 
here denotes past time intention.
I think we can find a number of constructions we might think of as 
semi-modals. It’s only messy if we feel language is under an obligation 
to be neatly classifiable. Langacker calls his (cognitive) approach 
“maximalist”, “non-reductive”, and “bottom-up.” Maybe one reason formal 
grammar study doesn’t carry over into writing (at least easily) is 
because it takes us away from the living language by being too 
minimalist, reductive, and top down.
The modals seem to me an area where the details, the nuances, are so 
key, so important.

Craig



Peter Adams wrote:
> I've only been following this list for about a year, and I'll be you 
> have thrashed this topic around more than once in the past. But I 
> wasn't here for those thrashings, so I'm inviting another round.
>
> How do you analyze tense and modals? Is "might" the past tense of 
> "may"? Is "could" the past tense of "can"? Or is it more accurate to 
> say that modals don't inflect for tense? There are ten (?) modals 
> (will, would, shall, should, can, could, may, might, must, and ought 
> to, and none of them is past tense.
>
> Peter Adams
>
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web 
> interface at:
> http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
>

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/