Chapter published in:
Crossroads Semantics: Computation, experiment and grammar
Edited by Hilke Reckman, Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng, Maarten Hijzelendoorn and Rint Sybesma
[Not in series 210] 2017
► pp. 263–279

Between desire and necessity

The complementarity of want and need

| Leiden University
In this paper, I relate three seemingly unrelated properties of the modal verb want that distinguish it from the semantically minimally different verb need. I show that these properties are determined by a single selectional characteristic that involves the evidential notions of perspective or evaluation. I argue that these notions must be configurationally represented, and that their properties can be couched in Binding theoretic principles. In addition, I show that uses of want expressing necessity and probability rather than desirability can be derived from this syntactic representation.
Keywords: modal, desirability, necessity, Binding, Speaker, perspective, evaluation, English, Dutch
Published online: 12 April 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.210.16roo
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