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
>
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