In this chapter, a more fine-grained distinction within the domain of Slavic universal necessity modals is advocated for between ‘true’ deontics and anankastics, i.e., operators expressing ‘non-epistemic,’ participant-external, ‘non-deontic’ necessity (van der Auwera and Plungian 1998). Although anankastic modals have been extensively treated in formal semantics approaches, which have mainly dealt with a set of conditional constructions apparently impervious to a compositional derivation, they have rarely been studied from a comparative perspective. On the basis of a mixed sample of corpus and questionnaire data from Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and Czech, a number of formal diagnostics designed to capture the distributional properties of anankastic modals are put to the test and aligned with the structural characteristics of Slavic modal systems.
What's in a Rule? A Cross-Slavic Survey of Anankastic Modals
Biasio Marco
2025-01-01
Abstract
In this chapter, a more fine-grained distinction within the domain of Slavic universal necessity modals is advocated for between ‘true’ deontics and anankastics, i.e., operators expressing ‘non-epistemic,’ participant-external, ‘non-deontic’ necessity (van der Auwera and Plungian 1998). Although anankastic modals have been extensively treated in formal semantics approaches, which have mainly dealt with a set of conditional constructions apparently impervious to a compositional derivation, they have rarely been studied from a comparative perspective. On the basis of a mixed sample of corpus and questionnaire data from Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and Czech, a number of formal diagnostics designed to capture the distributional properties of anankastic modals are put to the test and aligned with the structural characteristics of Slavic modal systems.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
