LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Modality, Mood and Modal Auxiliaries: A Critique

Prashant Mishra, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.

Abstract

This paper presents a critique of modality, mood and modal auxiliaries. The endeavour is to remove many a misconception related to modality, mood and modal auxiliaries. Various views of the prominent linguists and grammarians have been discussed . Grammarians confuse the notion of modality with modal verbs. However, modality is not a formal but a semantic concept which refers to a number of semantic categories like question, assertion, request, ability, wish, permission, possibility, insistence etc.

The semantic notion of modality is often influenced by various socio-cultural factors and manifested by the formal category of mood and modal auxiliaries. Some linguists regard mood as an inflectional category marked by verb inflections whereas some other linguists treats it as a syntactic category that depends upon the order of words in a sentence. However, C.C. Fries and Quirk and Greenbaum are among the linguists who rules out the existence of mood in English.

Unlike mood, grammarians agree on the category of modal auxiliaries. They define modals on morphological and syntactic criteria and regards meaning categories like ability, compulsion, permission etc.governing their use . However recent grammars like Collin's Cobuild extends the use of modals to pragmatics and regards their use situational and goal-oriented being governed by politeness and cooperative principles. Since mood does not exist in English, modal auxiliaries are the chief means of expressing modality.

Modality

Most of the grammarians deal with modality in terms of modal verbs. However, modality is not a formal notion, it is a semantic notion. It is "a conceptual category, a type of meaning, or complex of meanings, with various reflexes in language" (Khlebnikova 1976:3). Modality refers to certain meaning categories like question, assertion, request, ability, wish, permission, possibility, insistence etc. These meaning categories are expressed through the use of different moods such as declarative, interrogative, imperative or through the use of modals such as will, shall, can. Khlebnikova says that modality "is expressed principally in a generalized form, in the imperative and conjunctive moods, and also in the lexical meanings of modal verbs and certain lexical units" (1976:5).

Modality is a term used by the logicians to refer to a certain way of classifying propositions. It has been discussed since the days of Aristotle. Aristotle's 'De Interpretations' and 'Prior Analytics' are said to initiate the discussion on the modal logic. His discussion of the notions of necessity, possibility and impossibility and the relations between them are said to provide the basis of modal logic.

Modal logic deals with various propositions which are drawn from human attitudes and experiences from which semantic choices like necessity, possibility, impossibility, available for utterances, are derived. The method of analysis in modal logic is based on "the proposal that a proposition can be said to be true in one particular (real or imagined) world and false in another" (Perkins 1983:6). Modality is, thus, interpreted in terms of an event or a proposition and analyzed with respect to the universe in which such events or propositions are thought of as true or false. According to Perkins in the framework of modal logic "a given event or proposition may be made relative to, or may be qualified by, a particular world view, state of affairs, set of principles, etc" (1983:9).

Lyons, while discussing various types of modalities-- epistemic, deontic etc.-- treats mood as a grammatical category and favours the traditional description based on the inflected forms of the verbs. According to him, "Mood is a grammatical category that is to be found in some, but not all, languages. In traditional usage, 'mood' is applied to such subsets of inflected forms of verbs as are distinguished one from another by means of the terms 'indicative', 'imperative', 'subjunctive', etc; and we have chosen to respect this usage" (Lyons 1977: 848). But he has not attempted to define modality in the above cited work. However, in one of his earlier works (1968:308), Lyons has hinted at his notion of modality. He has discussed three scales of modality -- the scale of 'wish' and 'intention', of 'necessity'and 'obligation', and of 'certainty' and 'possibility'. However, the above classification of modality on three scales makes us infer that modality is a semantic term for Lyons and is expressed with the help of grammatical categories like mood and modal auxiliaries. Palmer (1979:4) too agrees with Lyons in this respect and treats mood and modality as two opposite categories-- the former is grammatical whereas the latter is semantic.

Halliday (1970), who made a significant contribution to the functional paradigm, believes that a text is a product of social and cultural context from where it springs. He is of the opinion that people use language with one another in order to manage their social lives. Modality is directly related to the social functions of language. Modality, which expresses different semantic implications like permission, request, obligation, necessity, possibility, is used to perform different communicative acts. Halliday regards modality a form of participation by the speaker in the communicative act. Modality is related to the interpersonal function of the language.

A language is used as a means of social interaction and it expresses various social roles and performs various communicative functions like questioning somebody, requesting or commanding somebody or telling somebody something. Such types of interpersonal functions of language are reflected in various sentence types like declarative, interrogative and imperative and also through the system of modals. The three choices in the mood system perform various communicative functions like declaring, asking a question, making a request or giving a command. With these sentence types, modal verbs like 'can', 'may', 'will', 'must' help in expressing various social functions such as making a request, seeking permission, expressing rights, obligation and possiblity. Thus, modality is directly related to the social functions of language.

Modality, as we have discussed above, is a notional category (Khlebnikova 1963, Harries 1978,Lyons 1968) used to perform various communicative functions (Halliday 1970). Performative verbs that indicate performance of action are said to express modality and illocutionary force in language. Austin believes that a person utters a sentence not only to convey something but also to perform some act. When a person utters a sentence like -- 'I promise to come back within a week'-- he is not making a simple statement but is performing the act of promising.

According to Austin, "a complete account of the meaning of a sentence cannot be restricted to semantic analysis as these are usually understood and that they must be extended to include information about the kind of speech act involved in uttering the sentence- that is, its illocutionary force" (Austin 1962 quoted in Boyd and Thorne 1969:58). In the beginning of his discussion, Austin makes a distinction between performative (short) utterances and constative (descriptive) utterances.

This distinction is related to the various functions performed by language. In his 1962 work "How to Do Things with Words", Austin says that constative utterances refer to the statements which describe some event, process or state of affairs and which can be characterised as either true or false. Performative utterances, on the other hand, instead of evaluating something as true or false, are used to do something. The difference between constative and performative utterances depends upon the difference between 'saying something and doing something by means of language'.

Austin, in this way, challenged the view of the logical positivists who thought that language makes only empirically verifiable statements. According to them, language had only one function i.e. descriptive. All the other utterances are classified as emotive.

But people, like Wittgenstein (1953), who were earlier associated with this theory, soon came to realize that language utterances are heterogeneous and are determined by various social conventions. A person becomes competent in the use of language by learning to use it in different types of social contexts. Besides relating the use of language to social situations, Wittgenstein also relates the semantic aspect of a word to its use.

Thus both Wittgenstein and Austin "emphasize the importance of relating the function of language to the social contexts in which languages operate and insist that, not only descriptive, but also non-descriptive utterances should be of concern to the philosopher" (Lyons 1977:728). Hence the theory of speech acts which relates modality, a notional concept, to the illocutionary force of an utterance, which is governed by various socio-cultural situations, is of great relevance to the study of moods and modals.

Modality is expressed linguistically by a number of devices like moods, modal auxiliaries, quasi auxiliaries, adjectival and participial expressions, nominal expressions, lexical verbs (Perkins 1983). Apart from these grammatical categories, modality is also manifested in orthographic devices like punctuation, prosodic features like stress and intonation-contour (Searle 1969). Verbal categories like tense are also used in some cases to express modality. Lyons says that "reference to the future..... is often as much a matter of modality as it is of purely temporal reference" (Lyons 1977:816).

In English, for example, modals like 'will' and 'may' have a temporal function besides their modal functions like prediction, willingness, intention, insistence. But most of the grammarians recognize the modal function as primary and the temporal function as secondary.

Moods and Modal auxiliaries are the two important grammatical categories which have the potential to express different aspects of modality. Modality and illocutionary force, which are influenced by various socio-cultural factors, are realized grammatically by the formal category of mood and modal auxiliaries. Moods and modal auxiliaries perform various grammatical functions like expressing modality and tense. But they primarily express different types of modality and illocutionary force.

The semantic notion of modality is often influenced by various socio-cultural factors. Linguists have now realised that modals have the singular potential to represent illocutionary force in language. For example, 'He will come on Monday' can be interpreted as 'I predict he comes on Monday'.

Searle regards the study of the meaning of sentences and the study of speech acts synonymous as "the speech act or acts performed in the utterance of a sentence are in general a function of the meaning of the sentence" (Searle 1969:18). This view of Searle's relates the semantic notion of modality to the functional concepts like speech act and illocutionary force. We have clearly stated that moods and modal auxiliaries are used in various languages to express various propositions. However, the meaning of these propositions is always influenced by various pragmatic forces.

We have so far tried to discuss the concept of modality and how it is related to the concepts of speech act and illocutionary force. Before going ahead in our study, we shall look at the concepts of mood and modal auxiliaries as these two grammatical categories are by and large capable of expressing different types of modality in various languages.

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