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Article published In:
Studies in Language
Vol. 43:3 (2019) ► pp.499–532

Must/need, may/can and the scope of the modal auxiliary

May thee know the pitfalls of thy paraphrases!

| Universite Laval

This article argues that the logical paraphrases used to describe the meanings of must, need, may, and can obscure the natural-language semantic interaction between these verbs and negation. The purported non-negatability of must is argued to be an illusion created by the indicative-mood paraphrase ‘is necessary’, which treats the necessity as a reality rather than a non-reality. It is proposed that negation coalesces with the modality that must itself expresses to produce a negatively-charged version of must’s modality: the subject of musn’t is represented as being in a state of constraint in which the only possibility open to the subject is oriented in the opposite direction to the realization of the infinitive’s event. The study also constitutes an argument against a lexicalization analysis: in the combination mustn’t, must and not each contribute their own meaning to the resultant sense, but according to their conceptual status as inherently irrealis notions.

Keywords: polarity, modal auxiliary, negation, paraphrase, logical semantics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The case of must
  • 3.The case of may
  • 4.What an approach based on linguistically-encoded meaning can contribute to the discussion
    • 4.1Linguistic evidence of the way English construes the meaning of the modal auxiliaries
    • 4.2Two forms of possibility in English
    • 4.3Two ways of construing necessity in English
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.18062.duf
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