Hostname: page-component-7f64f4797f-rcs6z Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-11-03T06:44:45.935Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Would have become: empty or modal will

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Rodney Huddleston
Rodney Huddleston
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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’.

Information

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

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