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1 LINGUIST List Wed Nov Review: Syntax: Barbiers et al, eds.(2002) Barbiers, Sjef, Frits Beukema, and Wim van der Wurff (eds.) (2002). Modality and its Interaction with the Verbal System. John Benjamins Publishing Company, hardback ISBN (Euro.) / (US), viii+290pp, Linguistik Actuell/ Linguistics Today 47. Zouhair Maalej, Department of English, University of Manouba, Tunis-Manouba / Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque Book s contents The book under review is a collection of papers first read to the 32 nd annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea on Modality in Generative Grammar at the University of St Andrews (Scotland, 1998). The book also includes invited papers. If Barbiers introductory paper is discounted, five out of the ten contributions deal with modality and its relation to negation or polarity. Current issues in modality, by Sjef Barbiers (pp. 1-17) Starting from the assumption that modals are ambiguous between a monadic (epistemic) and a dyadic (root) readings, Barbiers mentions five prevailing trends to explain this alternation: (i) Reducibility to transitive vs. intransitive, which is said not to apply even to languages like Dutch and German whose modals share common features with lexical verbs. (ii) Analyzability into subject raising vs. control structures, where a control analysis of modals seems to be fraught with all sorts problems. (iii) Generation at higher functional vs. lower lexical base positions, which positions are hard to establish owing to various contradictory research on different places for modals and lexical verbs, different positions for necessity and possibility, different positions at PF and LF, and developmental considerations. (iv) (v) Movement at LF vs. movement elsewhere Larger vs. smaller size complement selection, which turns out for Barbiers to be a more viable criterion for forcing epistemic or root interpretation.

2 Modal verbs: Epistemics in German and English, by Werner Abraham (pp ) Abraham imputes the different nature of modality in English and German to the loss by English of aspectual (or Actionsart) properties, and maintains that epistemic modals are analyzable as subject raising verbs and deontic modals as control structures. Modality and polarity, by Sjef Barbiers (pp ) Barbiers offers a view of the epistemic-deontic disambiguation along the kind of complement a modal may take, challenging the raising-control analysis. He starts by building arguments against the P-F deletion of the infinitive in the case of nonverbal modal complements, and concludes that Dutch modals can have a nonverbal complement, as long as this complement denotes a value on a bounded scale (P. 56). Verbal and non-verbal complements are said to allow root interpretations if they denote a variable property whereas when the complement of the modal denotes a fixed property of the subject, an epistemic interpretation is forced (p. 59). Modals, objects and negation in late Middle English, by Frits Beukema and Wim van der Wurff (pp ) Beukema and van der Wurff address word order in Middle English (ME) as a possible explanation for the epistemic-deontic distinction. They distinguish three stages in this order: (i) object in preverbal position (14 th C.), (ii) restricted occurrence of object in preverbal position (15 th C.), and (iii) disappearance of object from preverbal position (16 th C.). On the use and interpretation of root infinitives in early Dutch, by Elma Blom (pp ) Blom bases her paper on Hoekstra and Hyams (1998) treatment of root infinitives, rejecting [-realized] as ambiguous, default morphological marking as only perfective, and deontic vs. epistemic modality as only motivated by eventive vs. stative verb types. As an alternative, Blom offers a corpus-based analysis of root infinitives used by six Dutch children. The results are that root infinitives occur as modal and non-modal. Interestingly, modal root infinitives are [+V] whereas non-modal root infinitives are [+N], which, she suggests, strongly points to the fact that infinitives are analyzed by children as nouns. Modals and negation in English, by Annabel Cormack and Neil Smith (pp ) Cormack and Smith s paper is about the scope of modality and negation in English. They combine syntax, semantics and pragmatics to distinguish two

3 types of modals and three types of negation. They offer a cognitive requirement explanation for why epistemics are classed higher than deontics. System interaction in the coding of modality, by Zygmunt Frajzyngier (pp ) Frajzyngier found correlations in an East-Chadic language in the coding of modality between epistemic and indicative and deontic and imperative. Subdomains of the epistemic modality include hypotheticals and dubitatives. Subdomains of the deontic modality include subjunctives and prohibitatives. Markers of epistemic and deontic modality may co-occur within the same clause. Modality and theory of mind: Perspectives from language development and autism, by Anna Papafragou (pp ) Papafragou adduces evidence from autism to show how the capacity of autistic children to reason epistemically is impaired vis-à-vis their capacity to handle and understand deontic modality. She argues that this impairment is due to lack of the ability to metarepresent mental representations (p. 199). Negative polarity and modality in Middle Dutch ghe-particle constructions, by Gertjan Postma (pp ) Postma found that the Middle Dutch ghe-particle has all the verbal negative polarity items in Modern Dutch (p. 236). (Negative) Imperatives in Slovene, by Milena Milojevic Sheppard and Marija Golden (pp ) Contrary to main-clause claims for imperatives, Milojevic and Golden found imperatives in Slovene to occur within the focus of reporting verbs and in embedded contexts such as relative and appositive clauses. Modality and mood in Macedonian, by Olga Miseska Tomic (pp ) Miseska Tomic argues that lexical modals in Macedonian are tensed while modal auxiliaries are non-inflecting. The passage from tensed to tenseless is argued to have been at the origin of stopping taking subjunctive complements. Critical evaluation Their allegiance being to the TGG paradigm, the authors of this collection of papers, with very few exceptions, have obviously sought interaction only between modality/polarity and syntax and semantics within the verbal system. Such an allegiance has actually constricted the scope of this interaction. If the authors could for a moment leave aside ideological commitments, and look at modality as

4 a way language users interact socially with one another, they would realize how important are biological, social, cultural, and inferential factors in an account of modality. The assumption of ambiguity of modality expressions claimed by Barbiers is pragmatically questionable. In an appropriate context of use, John must be at home at six o clock, will not remain ambiguous between an either/or interpretation. This assumption has far reaching consequences for a theory of meaning calculation. Let us take polysemy, for instance. Is it the case that all the different co-polysemes remain active in spite of contextual features available to the language user/understander? The answer seems to me to be negative. The context has a selective/restrictive effect on active meanings as attested by psycholinguistic research on language processing. By the same token, does the context have nothing to do with disambiguating most of the de-contextualized examples of deontic and epistemic modality given in the collection? According to Barbiers, complements that force an epistemic interpretation include the following: (i) (ii) Stative complements which contain an individual-level predicate, provided that the subject has fixed reference. Perfect complements, but only if the completion stage of the event has taken place in the past. (p. 12) There must be no quarrel about this. However, there seems to exist at least another case where the complement is neither of what Barbiers mentioned, and yet the modal admits an epistemic reading as in the following example: She must be touching up her hair; it never used to be quite that auburn shade, which could be interpreted as current evidence forces me to conclude that she has been touching up her hair. It clearly is a case where the complement is progressive not perfective. One important contribution of this collection has to do with the variety of languages dealt with: English, Dutch, German, Macedonian, Slovene. Reference is also made in many papers to other languages. As a result of this variety of languages, the collection shows how much fine-tuning syntactic theory needs in light of emerging data from understudied languages that might put to question many of the claims of syntactic theory in relation to modality (cf. Bybee and Fleischman, 1995; Heine, 1995). As has been suggested -- implicitly and explicitly -- by contributors, more research is needed to ascertain the claims of current syntactic theory as legitimately about Language not a restricted collection of languages. This is evidenced by the many adjustments that syntactic theory had to adopt in order to fit commonsense claims and new data from newly studied languages.

5 Before closing this part, minor typos must be signaled: (i) Verb to be is missing from this cannot the whole story (p. 24). (ii) A in a invariable property of the subject should be an (p. 52). (iii) The en in the modals moeten must en mogen may are polarity items should be and (p. 68). (iv) Than in we show in this paper than the English modals should be that (p. 133). (v) Than in than that part of the undertaking should be then (p. 154). Bibliography Bybee, Joan & Suzanne Fleischman (1995). Modality in Grammar and Discourse: An Introductory Essay. In: Joan Bybee & Suzanne Fleischman (eds.), Modality in Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, Heine, Bernd (1995). Agent-oriented vs. Epistemic Modality: Some Observations on German Modals. In: Joan Bybee & Suzanne Fleischman (eds.), Modality in Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, Hoekstra, T. & N. Hyams (1998). Aspects of root infinitives. Lingua, 106, About the reviewer The reviewer is an assistant professor of linguistics. His interests include cognitive linguistics, metaphor, pragmatics, cognition-culture interface, modality, neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, critical discourse analysis, sign language and gesture, etc. He has been awarded a senior Fulbright research scholarship that he is currently using at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque ( ) in writing a book on cognitive metaphor, with special reference to Arabic.