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Re-Assessing Modalising Expressions: Categories, co-text, and context
Edited by Pascal Hohaus and Rainer Schulze
[Studies in Language Companion Series 216] 2020
► pp. 47–78

Chapter 3
The scope of modal categories

An empirical study

| Tohoku University

This paper investigates the scope of modal categories. While it is hypothesized in many linguistic theories that different modal categories have different scope, there are only very few systematic studies that show differences. The language of investigation is Japanese, which has grammaticalized all cross-linguistically relevant modal categories and has a strict and transparent head-final structure, which is conducive to the study of scope. The results show that different modal categories indeed have different scope. However the scope properties of all modal categories do not all perfectly align to form a “clean” hierarchy. These problems can be solved if one distinguishes between ‘active’ scope (i.e. the categories some category can take scope over) and ‘passive’ scope (i.e. the categories some category can take scope under), and separates volitional (mainly deontic and boulomaic) from non-volitional (mainly epistemic and evidential) modal categories.

Keywords: modality, modal categories, evidentiality, scope, scope ambiguity, Japanese
Article outline
  • 1.Goals and scope of this paper
  • 2.Modality and other categories of the Japanese verb and verbal complex
    • 2.1The modal categories
    • 2.2Other categories
    • 2.3 Selection of markers and constructions
    • 2.4A note on verbal morphology
  • 3.The data
  • 4. Scope analysis
    • 4.1No combination
    • 4.2No scope ambiguity
    • 4.3 Scope ambiguity obtains
  • 5.Summary and discussion: The scope of modal categories
  • Lists of abbreviations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 November 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.216.03nar
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