Making meaning withbe able to: modality and actualisation

Abstract

This article sheds new light on the usage constraints ofbe able to, by combining empirical evidence from theBritish National Corpus(BNC, Davies 2004–) with theoretical insights on the semantics–pragmatics interface. First, we show thatbe able todoes not, contrary to the general assumption, express only ‘ability’ but it shares most of the root meanings usually associated with the possibility modalscanandcould(Coates 1983: 124). The data analysis shows that what is called ‘opportunity’ in Depraetere & Reed's (2011) taxonomy is the most frequent meaning ofbe able to. We then turn to the notion of actualisation, which is often claimed to be the main distinguishing feature betweenbe able toandcan/could. The qualitative analysis of the BNC dataset provides the empirical evidence, lacking in previous research, for the claim that actualisation is indeed a defining property of the modal periphrastic form. Starting from a reassessment of the semantics–pragmatics interface in terms of a fourfold distinction, we argue that actualisation is a generalised conversational implicature and constitutes conventional pragmatic meaning (that is, conventional non-truth-conditional meaning).