The ordering sources in the interpretation of English modals exemplified with English must

Abstract

ABSTRACT An unquestionable characteristic of English modals is ambiguity. The particular modal flavors they receive are highly dependent on contexts, both linguistic (co-text) and non-linguistic (Hacquard 2006, Kratzer 1991, Szymański 2019). An account for this has been proposed by Kratzer (1991). In her model of the semantic field of modal expressions, Kratzer (1991) refers to the contextual factors that influence modal readings as conversational backgrounds. She draws a clear distinction between primary conversational backgrounds, i.e. modal bases, and secondary conversational backgrounds, i.e. ordering sources. The former are either circumstantial or epistemic. The latter impose an ordering on the possible worlds available in the context of a given proposition. The present study uses authentic language examples with the English modal must excerpted from The Corpus of Contemporary American English and demonstrates that there are frequently more than one ordering source in operation. Moreover, these ordering sources co-exist and intertwine, which makes their borders fuzzy. The study concludes that it may not be enough to take the context of an utterance into account, but it is also necessary to consider potential speaker’s reasoning, which we can only guess.