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Would have become: empty or modal will

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Rodney Huddleston
Rodney Huddleston
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
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Extract

In an earlier paper (Huddleston, 1977) I analysed the would of (I) If he had stayed in the army, he would have become a colonel as the unreal mood form of an epistemic modal verb WILL that figures in the underlying syntactic representation and falls within the semantic scope of a past element realized by HAVE. Palmer (1978) criticizes this analysis, claiming that WILL is ‘obviously’ semantically empty, a mere ‘dummy’ inserted to carry the mark of unreality – that would have become is ‘the Unreal and Past form of BECOME’.

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Type
Articles
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Journal of Linguistics , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , September 1979 , pp. 335 - 340
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

REFERENCES

Huddleston, R. D. (1977). Past tense transportation in English. JL 13. 43–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Palmer, F. R. (1974). The English verb. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Palmer, F. R. (1977). Modals and actuality. JL 13. 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Palmer, F. R. (1978). Past tense transportation: a reply. JL 14. 77–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar