On a special type of necessity modality: The German verb sollen viewed from parallel corpora

Abstract

The article discusses the thesis that the German verb sollen expresses a special type of modality that occupies an intermediate position between necessity and possibility, i.e. the modality of weak ontological necessity. The modality expressed by the verb sollen can be characterized as follows: sollen points to the correlation of the state of aff airs P with a certain logic of development of events, not the only possible, but salient in some respect. This is the diff erence between this type of modality and “classical” necessity, which assumes that the state of aff airs P corresponds to the only possible logic of the world. The study was conducted on the material of the German-Russian parallel subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus, using the “monofocal” method of contrastive analysis, according to which the way of translating the analyzed linguistic unit into another language is used as a tool for its semantic analysis.