Motivation in English must and Hungarian kell

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to find motivation (and perhaps also some of its limits) in grammatical structures associated with the English modal must and its Hungarian equivalent kell . Motivation is seen as coming from various ingredients of a conceptual structure associated with the modals that is assumed to be far more complex than was suggested in previous analyses of the 1990s. The view of modality offered here is more fine-grained in including participants and matching forces associated with them, especially in the deontic senses. The roles attributed to participants in conceptual structure can be seen as motivating alternative grammatical structures and, conversely, the presence of these structures can be taken as indirect evidence that the conceptual structure is valid. The correlation, however, has its limits as well. Some of the radical changes in conceptual structure resulting from the root to epistemic extension are at best marginally represented in grammatical structure. The paper also offers suggestions as to why this may be the case.