(Non)epistemic modality: English must, have to and have got to and their correspondences in Lithuanian

Audronė Šolienė

doi:10.15388/klbt.2016.10374

Abstract

This paper deals with the three types of modality – epistemic, deontic and dynamic. It examines the relation between the synchronic uses of the modal auxiliary must and the semi-modals have to and have got to as well as their Lithuanian translation correspondences (TCs) found in a bidirectional translation corpus. The study exploits quantitative and qualitative methods of research. The purpose is to find out which type of modality is most common in the use of must, have to and have got to; to establish their equivalents in Lithuanian in terms of congruent or non-congruent correspondence (Johansson 2007); and to determine how Lithuanian TCs (verbs or adverbials) correlate with different types of modality expressed. The analysis has shown that must is mostly used to convey epistemic nuances, while have to and have got to feature in non-epistemic environments. The findings show that must can boast of a great diversity of TCs. Some of them may serve as epistemic markers; others appear in deontic domains only. Have (got) to, on the other hand, is usually rendered by the modal verbs reikėti ‘need’ and turėti ‘must/have to’, which usually encode deontic modality.

Highlights

Modality is one of the widely discussed issues in linguistics and is especially rich in the proposed theoretical frameworks, interpretations, and definitions
The two main categories of event modality – deontic and dynamic – differ in that “deontic modality relates to obligation and permission, emanating from external source, whereas dynamic modality relates to ability or willingness, which comes from the individual concerned”
The first task of the qualitative analysis was to find out which type of modality – epistemic, deontic or dynamic – is expressed most often by the central modal auxiliary must and its historically later quasi-modal variants have to and have got to

Summary

Introduction

Modality is one of the widely discussed issues in linguistics and is especially rich in the proposed theoretical frameworks, interpretations, and definitions. The two main categories of event modality – deontic and dynamic – differ in that “deontic modality relates to obligation and permission, emanating from external source, whereas dynamic modality relates to ability or willingness, which comes from the individual concerned” Epistemic modality is defined as dealing with the “evaluation of the chances that a certain hypothetical state of affairs under consideration (or some aspect of it) will occur, is occurring or has occurred in a possible world” (Nuyts 2001, 21), as in: It concerns an indication of speaker’s estimation of the truth-value of the proposition expressed in the sentence. Deontic modality deals with the notions of permission and obligation (Palmer 2001, 8–11) and it can be defined as an “indication of the degree of moral desirability of the state of affairs expressed in the utterance typically, but not necessarily, on behalf of the speaker” (Nuyts 2006, 4), e.g.:. The paper sets out to determine how Lithuanian TCs (verbs or adverbials) correlate with different types of modality expressed by must, have to and have got to

Data and methods

Findings and discussion

Have to and have got to in English originals

Concluding observations