Necessity, obligation and modern greek verbal aspect

Abstract

The Modern Greek modal prépi, in addition to its epistemic sense, may refer to obligation or to physical necessity. When it occurs with a temporal adverbial referring to rate of occurrence such as ‘rarely’, ‘ten times a day’, it may have wide or narrow scope in respect of such expressions. In its deontic uses it always has wide scope; in its nondeontic uses narrow scope. Because scope differences may have implications for the aspect of complement verbs, aspect may provide information respecting modal force. In the case of physical modality aspectual choice is influenced by the relative event frequency indicated by the adverbial. As frequency increases and the points corresponding to occurrences of the causes approach linearity, so does the chance of an imperfect aspect in the complement. This is no accident as deontic modality always corresponds to an unbroken line and with rate expressions always requires an imperfective complement.