Hostname: page-component-75d7c8f48-z5ksc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-03-14T02:41:42.860Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Old English *Motan, Variable-Force Modality, and the Presupposition of Inevitable Actualization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Igor Yanovich
Igor Yanovich*
Affiliation:
Universität Tübingen
*
Universität Tübingen, Wilhelmstraße 19, Tübingen 72074, Germany [igor.yanovich@uni-tuebingen.de]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Old English *motan and Middle English *moten, the ancestors of modern must, are commonly described as ambiguous between a possibility and a necessity reading. I argue instead that in the Alfredian Old English prose, *motan was a nonambiguous ‘variable-force’ modal, with the modal force different from both possibility and necessity. I propose that *motan's variable-force effect was due to the presupposition of a collapse between possibility and necessity. Informally, motan(p) presupposed ‘if p gets a chance to actualize, it will’. I then trace the development of *motan into a modal genuinely ambiguous between necessity and possibility in Early Middle English.

Keywords

* motan, Old Englishmodalitysemantic changevariable force

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 92 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 489 - 521
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 Linguistic Society of America

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

Abusch, Dorit. 2012. Circumstantial and temporal dependence in counterfactual modals. Natural Language Semantics 20. 273–97. DOI: 10.1007/s11050-012-9082-5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Askedal, John Ole. 2012. Norwegian få ‘get. A survey of its uses in present-day Riksmål/Bokmål. Linguistics 50. 1289–1331. DOI: 10.1515/ling-2012-0041.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bethurum, Dorothy. 1957. The homilies of Wulfstan. Oxford: Clarendon.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bosworth, Joseph, and Toller, T. Northcote. 1898. An Anglo-Saxon dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Breitbarth, Anne. 2011. Modality and negation in the history of Low German. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 30. 131–67. DOI: 10.1515/zfsw.2011.007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Condoravdi, Cleo. 2002. Temporal interpretation of modals: Modals for the present and for the past. The construction of meaning, ed. by Beaver, David, Cassillas Martinez, Luis D., Clark, Brandy Z., and Kaufmann, Stefan, 59–82. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Daugavet, Anna. 2014. Acquisitive modals in Latvian. Paper presented at Chronos 11, Pisa, Italy, June 2014.Google Scholar
Deal, Amy Rose. 2011. Modals without scales. Language 87. 559–85. DOI: l0.l353/lan.2011.0060.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dictionary of Old English, The (a-g) (DOE). 2007. Toronto: University of Toronto. Online: http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/.Google Scholar
Fischer, Olga. 1994. The development of quasi-auxiliaries in English and changes in word order. Neophilologus 78. 137–64. DOI: 10.1007/BF00999959.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giles, et al. (eds.) 1858. The whole works of King Alfred the Great, with preliminary essays illustrative of the history, arts, and manners of the ninth century. London: Bosworth & Harrison.Google Scholar
Godden, Malcolm, and Irvine, Susan. 2009. The Old English Boethius. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Goossens, Louis. 1987. Modal tracks: The case of magan and motan. Studies in honour of Rene Derolez, ed. by Simon-Vanderbergen, Anne-Marie, 216–36. Gent: Vitgeuer.Google Scholar
Hacquard, Valentine. 2009. On the interaction of aspect and modal auxiliaries. Linguistics and Philosophy 32. 279–315. DOI: 10.1007/s10988-009-9061-6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hasenfratz, Robert (ed.) 2000. Ancrene Wisse. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications. Searchable version provided by TEAMS (The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) available online at: http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/hasenfratz-ancrene-wisse.Google Scholar
Heim, Irene. 1991. Artikel und Definitheit. Semantik: Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung, ed. by Stechow, Arnim von and Wunderlich, Dieter, 487535. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kangasniemi, Heikki. 1992. Modal expressions in Finnish. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.Google Scholar
Kitson, Peter. 1992. Old English dialects and the stages of the transition to Middle English. Folia Linguistica Historica 11. 27–87. DOI: 10.1515/flih.1990.11.1-2.27.Google Scholar
Kratzer, Angelika. 1981. The notional category of modality. Words, worlds, and context: New approaches in word semantics, ed. by Eikmeyer, Hans-Jürgen and Rieser, Hannes, 38–74. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kratzer, Angelika. 2012. Modals and conditionals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Matthewson, Lisa. 2013. Gitksan modals. International Journal of American Linguistics 79. 349–94. DOI: 10.1086/670751.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Middle English Dictionary (MED). 2002. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Online: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/.Google Scholar
Millett, Bella. 2005. Ancrene Wisse: A corrected edition of the text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with variants from other manuscripts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Drawing on the uncompleted edition by E. J. Dobson, with a glossary and additional notes by Richard Dance.).Google Scholar
Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English syntax. Oxford: Clarendon.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ogawa, Hiroshi. 1989. Old English modal verbs: A syntactical study. (Anglistica 26.) Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger.Google Scholar
Ono, Shigeru. 1958. Some notes on the auxiliary *motan. Anglica 3.64–80. Oxford English dictionary (OED). 2002. 3.d edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Peterson, Tyler. 2010. Epistemic modality and evidentiality in Gitksan at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Vancouver: University of British Columbia dissertation.Google Scholar
Portner, Paul. 2009. Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rullmann, Hotze, Matthewson, Lisa; and Davis, Henry. 2008. Modals as distributive indefinites. Natural Language Semantics 16. 317–57. DOI: 10.1007/s11050-008-9036-0.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schlenker, Philippe. 2012. Maximize presupposition and Gricean reasoning. Natural Language Semantics 20. 391–429. DOI: 10.1007/s11050-012-9085-2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Solo, Harry Jay. 1977. The meaning of *motan: A secondary denotation of necessity in Old English? Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 78. 215–32. Online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43343133.Google Scholar
Stalnaker, Robert. 1981. Adefense of conditional excluded middle. Ifs: Conditionals, belief, decision, chance, and time, ed. by Harper, William, Pearce, Glenn, and Stalnaker, Robert, 87–104. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.Google Scholar
Standop, Ewald. 1957. Syntax und Semantik der modalen Hilfsverben im Altenglischen Magan, Motan, Sculan, Willan. Bochum-Langendreer: Pöppinghaus.Google Scholar
Sweet, Henry. 1871. King Alfreds West-Saxon version of Gregory's Pastoral Care. (Early English text society 45, 50.) Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tellier, André. 1962. Les verbes perfecto-présents et les auxiliaires de mode en anglais ancien: (viiie s. -xvie s.). Paris: Klincksieck.Google Scholar
Toller, T. Northcote. 1921. An Anglo-Saxon dictionary: Supplement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tragel, Ilona, and Habicht, Külli. 2012. Grammaticalization of Estonian saama ‘to get’. Linguistics 50. 1371–1412. DOI: 10.1515/ling-2012-0043.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1989. On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: An example of subjectification in semantic change. Language 65. 31–55. DOI: 10.2307/414841.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Dasher, Richard B.. 2002. Regularity in semantic change. (Cambridge studies in linguistics 96.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
van der Auwera, Johan. 2001. On the typology of negative modals. Perspectives on negation and polarity items, ed. by Hoeksema, Jack, Rullmann, Hotze, Sánchez-Valencia, Víctor, and van, Ton Wouden, der, 23–48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van der Auwera, Johan, Kehayov, Petar; and Vittrant, Alice. 2009. Acquisitive modals. Cross-linguistic studies of tense, aspect, and modality, ed. by Hogeweg, Lotte, Hoop, Helen de, and Malchukov, Andrej, 271–302. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van der Auwera, Johan, and Plungian, Vladimir. 1998. Modality's semantic map. Linguistic Typology 2. 79–124. DOI: 10.1515/lity.1998.2.1.79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Viberg, Åke. 2002. Polysemy and disambiguation cues across languages: The case of Swedish få and English get. Lexis in contrast: Corpus-based approaches, ed. by Altenberg, Bengt and Granger, Sylviane, 119–50. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Viberg, Åke. 2012. Language-specific meanings in contrast: A corpus-based contrastive study of Swedish få ‘get’. Linguistics 50. 1413–61. DOI: 10.1515/ling-2012-0044.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Visser, Frederikus Theodorus. 1946. A syntax of the English language of St. Thomas More. Louvain: Librarie Universitaire.Google Scholar
Visser, Frederikus Theodorus. 1963-1973. An historical syntax of the English language. Leiden: E. J. Brill.Google Scholar
Warner, Anthony R. 1993. English auxiliaries: Structure and history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Yanovich supplementary material

Yanovich supplementary material
Download Yanovich supplementary material(File)
File 126.8 KB