Jed,

 

Modal verbs are messy because they appear to have past tenses,
may/might, can/could, will/would, shall/should.  "Must" itself is
originally a past subjunctive form, which is why it has not past tense
form in Modern English.  However, this apparent tense marking is
misleading.  There are only a few conditions under which their dental
preterit (a term for the past tense in -d/-t that is common to the
Germanic languages, actually marks past tense.  The most common of these
is in a sequence of tenses construction.  Compare

 

Jack says that he will run down the hill with a bucket of water.

Jack said that he would run down the hill with a bucket of water.

 

The past tense of the dependent clause agrees with the past tense of the
main clause.  We can say the sentence with "will" in the dependent
clause, but it's meaning will be slightly different.

 

Other than sequence of tenses, the dental preterits have come to behave
like separate modals that only look morphologically related to the base
stems.

 

Further, modals tend to fall into two large semantic categories of
usage, what's called "root" or "deontic" and what's called "epistemic".
The deontic meaning comes closer to the historical meanings of the
words.  For example,

 

Jack may run down the hill.

 

can be interpreted deontically, meaning that he has permission.  It can
also be interpreted epistemically, meaning that his running down the
hill is a possibility.  Usually, deontic uses have truth value, that is,
they can be shown to be true of false.  If Jack says he "may", that he
has permission, he may or may not be telling the truth.  If someone says
"may" meaning that it's a possibility, the statement cannot be said to
be true or false because its irrealis, that is, it states an unfulfilled
condition.

 

Because of these different things that modals do, they are treated
separately from main verbs.  They don't, in fact, have tense marking,
except in the very restricted way I described, and they, when epistemic,
have to do with whether or not the proposition has truth value and the
conditions under which it might.  They also express the speaker's
attitude towards the proposition.  They differ syntactically in that
they cannot be preceded by a negative.  Main verbs can't be followed by
a negative; any negative must follow an earlier auxiliary verb, and
modals fit into this pattern syntactically.  They also invert with the
subject in questions and get copied to the end in tag questions.  Main
verbs don't do these things.

 

Syntacticians have come up with some clever ways of handling these
facts, but I'll let someone else address that.

 

Herb

 

________________________________

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jed Dews
Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 8:55 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Question about modal verbs

 

Hi all,

   I have another question that has come out of some recent class
discussions. Perhaps someone can help me out.

   My question is this: are modal verbs finite (carrying grammatical
tense) even though they are not inflected or marked in any way to show
that tense? Do syntacticians (sp?) consider the tense to be there
(perhaps marked with some kind of abstract zero morpheme) even though we
can't see it? I've always read (and it makes sense with most examples)
that the first verb in a verb string is the finite one, and since modals
appear first in the verb string (or in my Southern grammar, appear
first, second, or even third in a string of modals) then they must be
finite!? 

   Thanks for any help you can offer on this -- I've checked several
references only to get very ambiguous answers. 

Jed

 

*****************************************************************

John (Jed) E. Dews 

Instructor, Undergraduate Linguistics

MA-TESOL/Applied Linguistics Program

Educator, Secondary English Language Arts

English Department, 208 Rowand-Johnson Hall (Office)

University of Alabama

 

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