Morphosyntactic and semantic properties of Romanian modal verbs putea and trebui

Abstract

The paper presents some key aspects related to the semantics of Romanian modal verbs putea, ‘can’/’may’ and trebui, ‘must’, focusing mainly on identifying the interaction between these verbs on the one hand and temporal and aspectual marking on the other. It is shown that certain temporal relations are associated with certain modal flavors. These interactions are better understood by teasing apart two distinct temporal anchors (the temporal perspective, i.e. the time of the modal evaluation), and the temporal orientation (i.e. the time of the event introduced by the lexical verb). Certain patterns emerge: for instance, deontic readings are associated with future orientation, epistemic interpretations are associated with present temporal perspective etc. Non-episodic contexts are shown to resist such generalizations.