Representing modality

[bradrn]

Mandarin verbal particle combined with a resultative verbal complement.

你聽懂我意思嗎？ nǐ tīng-dǒng wǒ yìsi ma?
2SG listen-understand 1SG meaning Q?
'Do you understand what I mean?' (Literally, "you listen-understand my meaning [yes/no-question]?".)

你聽得懂我意思嗎？ nǐ tīng-de-dǒng wǒ yìsi ma?
2SG listen-get-understand 1SG meaning Q?
'Can you understand what I mean?' (Literally, "you listen-can-understand my meaning [yes/no-question]?".)

你聽不懂我意思嗎？ nǐ tīng-bu-dǒng wǒ yìsi ma?
2SG listen-not-understand 1SG meaning Q?
'So you can't understand what I mean?' (Literally, "you listen-not-understand my meaning [yes/no-question]?".)

Maybe this is a stupid question, but where exactly is the resultative here?

From what I understand, it would be 懂 dǒng 'understand' (in these examples, understand as a result of listening).

Are you sure? If I look it up, 聽懂 tīngdǒng seems to be the Mandarin word for ‘to understand’.

[Vijay]

Yes. It's not the only way to say 'to understand'; it means to understand as a result of listening. To understand as a result of reading, for example, would be 看懂 kàndǒng (看 literally means 'to look' but can also mean 'to read'). EDIT: 懂 is also grammatical all by itself in a lot of contexts. There are other ways to say 'to understand' in Mandarin, too.

[Kuchigakatai]

And in the second sentence, what is the purpose of nó ‘or’?

Grammarians consider it a pleonastic usage. I don't know how it originated, just that certain idioms demand it.

This reminds me of those Mandarin constructions where you add 而 ér '(verbal) and' for seemingly no synchronic reason, notably 為...而 wèi...ér (e.g. 為前途而奮鬥 wèi qiántú ér fèndòu 'to strive for the future', lit. "for future and strive") and 因...而 yīn...ér (e.g. 因某事而聞名 yīn mǒushì ér wénmíng 'to be known for something', lit. "because.of something and be.reknown").

Peeking at Classical Chinese it's easy to explain these as a survival of the original coordination between verbs that created Mandarin's serial verb constructions (wèi...ér "being for something and doing something", yīn...ér "depending on something and doing something"), even though neither 為 wèi nor 因 yīn can be verbs anymore.

How do you know whether to use the active or passive? Is it determined by the modal verb used (e.g. wajaba is always active, ʾalzama is always passive), or are there other conditions?

It is determined by the modal verb used.

Would this construction be similar to the Welsh example Linguoboy gave?

The negated existential? Sure, yeah.

Maybe this is a stupid question, but where exactly is the resultative here?

What Vijay said.

To me, these look like headless relative clauses (which is then nominalised in the Arabic example).

That depends on what you mean by "headless relative clause". The second Mandarin example surely seems to be one, but the first one is definitely not. The Arabic one uses a passive voice participle, so it depends on whether you think participles can count as relative clauses (not normally the case among linguists, but some like Geoffrey Pullum argue in favour of that).

[Salmoneus]

It could be a relic of where these examples were culled from. There's dialectal variation in how acceptable it is to drop sé in impersonal expressions, with Munster speakers being by far the most likely to do this. (See Ó Siadhail, Modern Irish, p. 308.)

They're all from the same online grammar page, so dialect probably isn't the answer. [It's reassuring to hear that this isn't just another inbuilt random thing, though]

Gramadach na Gaeilge, nach ea? He does pull his examples from various dialects, often without labeling them as such. (Ó Siadhail is much more conscientious about this.)

Ahh, ok. And yes, although of course in my case the English version...

However...

As you know, Munster is my chosen variety and FWIW I've never come across bheith ar chumas used by Munster speakers for "can". (I googled it and it seems to be quite literary; most Ghits were for Bible passages. So it could be as much a register difference as anything.)

That could be. It could be that the guy instinctively included the pronoun because he was giving an example of a more formal register. [he doesn't present this as the default, I just went with it because it demonstrated a different structure]

Ó Siadhail presents a fuller discussion of the use of proleptic pronouns on pages 271-5. In particular, he points out that it's an innovative usage; insofar as it eschews them, colloquial Munster actually represents the earlier state of affairs. So Tá orm bainne a ól might be better glossed as "Milk to drink is on me", with the exceptional position of orm (usually a final element) explained by the rightward movement of a heavy NP subject[*]. But having the subject immediately follow the verb is such a powerful default in Modern Irish that speakers perceive a gap here and plug it with sé.

Ah! Thank you! That makes sense!

[whenever I've tried looking at Irish, "what the fuck is that pronoun doing there!?" has usually been one of the sticking points, conceptually.]

Why is it perceived as more necessary to do this in a sentence like Tá sé ar mo chumas é a dheanamh than a sentence like Tá orm bainne a ól ? I would venture that the complexity of the intervening adjunct has something to do with it. That is, ar mo chumas is three words whereas orm (bzw. uaim) is one. The presence of a pronominal object in the nominal clause could also be a factor.

That makes sense, thank you. I mean, only in the "everything is idiomatic and designed to be as difficult as possible for the learner" way of making sense, but that's at least better than "there are no reasons, every sentence is arbitrary".

It seems to be that it's "is" because "tá" can only be used with an actual concrete noun, and any sort of abstract or less-than-nominal expression requires "is". Except that, leaving aside that it's not obvious why this should be, it doesn't explain why "bainne a ól" is considered "a substantive" while "do Shéan a theacht" is considered only a "mode". Maybe it's because the actual "substantive" is just "bainne"? I don't know.

The author seems to be using "mode" to cover all non-nominal predicates and adjuncts, including adjectives and prepositional phrases. Well, what is do Shéan a theacht if not a prepositional phrase? The answer is two of them, actually, a being simply a variant form of do. Bainne a ól, by contrast, is a substantive (bainne) followed by a prepositional phrase (a ól), i.e. "milk to drink". The two complexes don't have the same internal syntax, so it shouldn't be surprising that the respective matrix sentences handle each of them differently.

Not surprising, but it would be nice if there were a specific correspondance between the syntax of one and that of the other, so that one could extrapolate from these two sentences to other possible sentences. I can see that there are several potential triggers for the difference, but that's only helpful if it's possible to pinpoint which trigger(s) actually IS relevant.

[*] There's also a mismatch here between syntactic function and semantic role comparable to what you find in, e.g. Spanish me gusta la leche "I like milk", which is only compounded by the fact that the logical consequence of Tá orm bainne a ól is Tá mé ag ól bainne (with "I" now both the agent and the grammatical subject and "milk" the patient and grammatical object).

Oddly, I have zero problem with that, it doesn't feel like a mismatch at all. It's an extension of the basic IE system for possession and location. And of course it's virtually the same as English: "it's on me to drink milk" is modern English, and the inverted "milk to drink" is just a bit shakespearian.

It's the bits where the rules seem to be decided randomly on a sentence-by-sentence basis that do my head in.

[bradrn]

I decided to reread this thread recently, after reading some more about both modality and complement clauses, and I realised that it would probably be quite nice to have a summary of all the various techniques for representing modality which have been outlined in this thread. Additionally, I have just realised that many of the lists here contain lots of duplicates, obscured by the fact that English has many different types of complement clause, meaning that two sentences which look quite different can actually have the same underlying structure. So here’s the summary list I came up with:

• Auxiliary verbs (‘I can [do it]’)
• Adverbs (‘Possibly [I did it]’)
• Verbal affixes (Tamil -laam, -um ‘possibility, necessity’)
• Transitive verbs with a subclause (‘I am.able [to do it]’; here am.able is a single verb, as with Arabic istaṭaʻa); these can also occur passivised (‘they require me [to do it]’ ⇒ ‘I am required [to do it]’)
• Intransitive verbs with a subclause (‘[to do it] is.necessary’; again is.necessary is a single verb, as with Arabic wajaba)
• Copula with adjective plus subclause; the subject of the copula could be the agent (‘I am able [to do it]’) or the subclause itself (‘[That I do it] is necessary’)
• Copula with prepositional phrase plus subclause (something like ‘[doing it] is from our obligation’, or English ‘[ensuring this] is on us’)
• Copula with subclause and noun (‘[Ensuring this] is our responsibility’)
• Prepositional phrases (‘[I did it] for sure’)
• Existential constructions (‘There is a chance [that I did it]’)

(Formatting conventions: I have consistently bracketed the clause the modal is applied to, and have underlined the modal)

I believe that’s all the possibilities listed; can anyone think of any others that I missed out?

[Kuchigakatai]

I believe that’s all the possibilities listed; can anyone think of any others that I missed out?

I'm guessing you merged my "sentential particles" category with your "adverbs", but some languages have distinct words (normally unstressed and short in length) that can occur only at the beginning or only at the end of a sentence, which modify the sentence entirely. I'd say they count separately from adverbs because they're basically a distinct word class... Cantonese definitely has both regular boring adverbs and sentence-final particles.

[bradrn]

I believe that’s all the possibilities listed; can anyone think of any others that I missed out?

I'm guessing you merged my "sentential particles" category with your "adverbs", but some languages have distinct words (normally unstressed and short in length) that can occur only at the beginning or only at the end of a sentence, which modify the sentence entirely. I'd say they count separately from adverbs because they're basically a distinct word class... Cantonese definitely has both regular boring adverbs and sentence-final particles.

Yes, I had assumed that they were the same. But I still don’t understand exactly what the difference is: given a Cantonese word, for instance, how can you tell whether it is an adverb or a sentential particle?

[Kuchigakatai]

Yes, I had assumed that they were the same. But I still don’t understand exactly what the difference is: given a Cantonese word, for instance, how can you tell whether it is an adverb or a sentential particle?

Adverbs generally modify a following word (adverb + adjective, adverb + verb), and can sometimes also occur at the beginning of a sentence. Phonetically they bear quite a lot of stress and clear lexical tones. They are often disyllabic or trisyllabic unless they're very basic, and derived adverbs have either an obvious relation to content words or have sound symbolism.

In contrast, the Cantonese sentence-final particles are monosyllabic, very unstressed, typically have the plain mid-level tone (typical of the most basic grammatical words) or are otherwise liable to have this or that tone depending on the speaker's mood, modify the whole sentence before them, and have no obvious relation to content words or sound symbolism.

They... feel pretty different in that language.

[bradrn]

Yes, I had assumed that they were the same. But I still don’t understand exactly what the difference is: given a Cantonese word, for instance, how can you tell whether it is an adverb or a sentential particle?

Adverbs generally modify a following word (adverb + adjective, adverb + verb), and can sometimes also occur at the beginning of a sentence. Phonetically they bear quite a lot of stress and clear lexical tones. They are often disyllabic or trisyllabic unless they're very basic, and derived adverbs have either an obvious relation to content words or have sound symbolism.

In contrast, the Cantonese sentence-final particles are monosyllabic, very unstressed, typically have the plain mid-level tone (typical of the most basic grammatical words) or are otherwise liable to have this or that tone depending on the speaker's mood, modify the whole sentence before them, and have no obvious relation to content words or sound symbolism.

They... feel pretty different in that language.

Thanks for explaining! I think that much of the confusion comes from the fact that ‘adverb’ in English is a bit of a catch-all category: it can be hard to tell whether an adverb in English is modifying the following verb, the whole sentence or something else entirely.

[Moose-tache]

It seems that the basic variables are:
1) Is the modal sign clause-internal (suffixes, adverbs, etc.) or clause-external (verbs that give modal information about their subjects/objects)? For external modal signs, the modal sign can be a) an intransitive/stative verb, adjective, locative, or copular construction that gives modal information about its subject, b) a transitive verb that gives modal information about its object, or c) any predicate that gives modal information about an adverbial clause. Any of those categories may be further subject to the usual voice and valency transformations of the language, such as passives, causatives, or applicatives. "Auxiliaries" could go almost anywhere in this list, depending on the language-specific syntax that governs them.

so in an example like "It is required that Sally eat a sandwich," we can place the modal sign "require" within our typology thusly: It is a clause-external, object-modifier, subject to passive voice. An English auxiliary like "can" could be either a clause-internal modal sign with special restrictions (doesn't behave like a main verb, serial verb, adverb, etc.) or a clause-external modal sign with special restrictions (immune to passive voice, unable to take simple nouns as object, etc.), depending on how we want to classify it. For English, clause-internal probably makes more sense. In other cases, like Japanese "...koto ga dekiru," we may encounter a similar meaning in a clearly clause-external form.

[bradrn]

It seems that the basic variables are:
1) Is the modal sign clause-internal (suffixes, adverbs, etc.) or clause-external (verbs that give modal information about their subjects/objects)? For external modal signs, the modal sign can be a) an intransitive/stative verb, adjective, locative, or copular construction that gives modal information about its subject, b) a transitive verb that gives modal information about its object, or c) any predicate that gives modal information about an adverbial clause. Any of those categories may be further subject to the usual voice and valency transformations of the language, such as passives, causatives, or applicatives. "Auxiliaries" could go almost anywhere in this list, depending on the language-specific syntax that governs them.

so in an example like "It is required that Sally eat a sandwich," we can place the modal sign "require" within our typology thusly: It is a clause-external, object-modifier, subject to passive voice.

I really like this classification! It feels like a really coherent way to make sense of the many modal signs I listed. I think it reflects the reality of modals too, in that ‘clause-internal’ signs tend to be part of a closed system of modals, whereas ‘clause-external’ modals are pretty much an open class. (Although I could be wrong with this.)

An English auxiliary like "can" could be either a clause-internal modal sign with special restrictions (doesn't behave like a main verb, serial verb, adverb, etc.) or a clause-external modal sign with special restrictions (immune to passive voice, unable to take simple nouns as object, etc.), depending on how we want to classify it. For English, clause-internal probably makes more sense. In other cases, like Japanese "...koto ga dekiru," we may encounter a similar meaning in a clearly clause-external form.

I think the big problem with ‘auxilliary verbs’ is that the term can mean different things depending on the language — so English ‘auxilliary verbs’ are not the same word type as Japanese ‘auxilliary verbs’.

[Moose-tache]

I think the big problem with ‘auxilliary verbs’ is that the term can mean different things depending on the language — so English ‘auxilliary verbs’ are not the same word type as Japanese ‘auxilliary verbs’.

Agree. That's why, in my system, we can chuck the word out the window as a term of descriptivist grammar, and retain it on a language-specific basis to describe a part of speech, similar to terms like "helper verb" or "na-adjective."

[Kuchigakatai]

I really like this classification! It feels like a really coherent way to make sense of the many modal signs I listed. I think it reflects the reality of modals too, in that ‘clause-internal’ signs tend to be part of a closed system of modals, whereas ‘clause-external’ modals are pretty much an open class. (Although I could be wrong with this.)

I like the classification, although regarding your comment I think European languages usually have an open class of clause-internal modality elements. In English you find a large number of adverbs like: maybe, perhaps, possibly, plausibly, probably, perchance, imaginably, conceivably... And prepositional phrases like: by obligation, by necessity, through peer pressure, by convention, under moral obligation...

[bradrn]

I really like this classification! It feels like a really coherent way to make sense of the many modal signs I listed. I think it reflects the reality of modals too, in that ‘clause-internal’ signs tend to be part of a closed system of modals, whereas ‘clause-external’ modals are pretty much an open class. (Although I could be wrong with this.)

I like the classification, although regarding your comment I think European languages usually have an open class of clause-internal modality elements. In English you find a large number of adverbs like: maybe, perhaps, possibly, plausibly, probably, perchance, imaginably, conceivably... And prepositional phrases like: by obligation, by necessity, through peer pressure, by convention, under moral obligation...

Good point — I had forgot about that.