Abstract
This paper investigates the semantics of the suffix -NE in Javanese (Austronesian; Indonesia), bringing to light new findings to bear on the composition of modal strength distinctions. In a transparent manner, this functional morpheme derives weak necessity modals from strong necessity modals, but cannot attach to possibility modals to derive weak possibility. Javanese thereby takes a different compositional route to weak necessity than most Indo-European languages, which might lexicalise modal strength distinctions or rely on counterfactual morphology for that purpose. We propose a new type of domain restriction analysis for weak necessity to capture both the defining properties of weak necessity as well as the restriction in Javanese to only necessity modals. Specifically, we propose that -NE requires quantification over a non-empty subset of a minimal witness set for the original quantification. The Javanese data thus show that weak necessity is not a unified phenomenon across languages, and our analysis contributes to a model of crosslinguistic variation concerning the relationship between gradability and modality, and the semantics of weak modal strength. EARLY ACCESS
Highlights
The expression of modality in natural language can be descriptively characterised by three dimensions of meaning: modal force, modal flavour, and modal strength
Paciran village is located on the North shore of East Java, near the town Tuban as shown on the map in Figure 3.11 The data in this paper are in ngoko ‘low’, which is the speech level most widely used in Paciran given its geographical distance from the Javanese courtly centers
We develop an analysis for Javanese -NE that is a new variant of a domain restriction approach: While we maintain with von Fintel & Iatridou (2008) that weak quantificational strength in Javanese is a result of quantifying over a subset of the original domain of quantification that is determined by the accessibility relation and the primary ordering source, we propose that this quantification is over a contextually provided, non-empty subset of a minimal witness set for the quantification
Summary
The expression of modality in natural language can be descriptively characterised by three dimensions of meaning: modal force (necessity versus possibility), modal flavour (e.g., epistemic versus root), and modal strength (strong versus weak). Languages appear to rely on two strategies to weaken a necessity modal (von Fintel & Iatridou 2008): They might lexicalise this weak necessity meaning (like presentday English) or derive weak necessity modals from their strong counterparts using counterfactual morphology (like French). We discuss original fieldwork data from Javanese (Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian; Indonesia), which uses yet another strategy: The language has a dedicated functional morpheme, -NE, which combines with a strong necessity modal to derive a weak one. The paper is organised as follows: In Section 2, we discuss the crosslinguistic literature and approaches to deriving weak modal strength, focusing on domain restriction and degree-based analyses of weak necessity.
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