The Semantic Interaction of Negation with Epistemic and Deontic Ppossibility and Necessity in Persian Modal Verbs

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Assistant Professor at Foreign Languages Department, Hazrat-e Masoumeh University (HMU), Qom, Iran.

Abstract

This descriptive-analytic study aimed at investigating the semantic interaction of negation with the epistemic and deontic possibility and necessity senses of a select group of central Persian modal verbs (i.e., tavanestan, shodan, momken budan, emkan dashtan, bayestan and lazem budan). Among these modal verbs, the first four express the notion of possibility and the rest express necessity. Necessity and possibility constitute the core of modality domain. Modality as a semantic category mainly deals with speaker’s attitude or opinion regarding the state of affairs. Epistemic and deontic modality are the two main types of modality. The former expresses speaker’s judgment regarding the truth or falsehood of propositions while the latter deals with speaker’s influence on actualization or non-actualization of actions. Modal verbs are among the commonly used modal forms in Persian. Negation has logical and semantic interactions with modality (especially, possibility and necessity notions). Negation appears in Persian modal verbs and main verbs as ن- prefix. In this study, the views of Palmer (1995) and de Haan (1997), who both investigated the interaction of negation and modality from typological point of view, were used as the theoretical framework. The examples used as evidence in our analyses were mainly extracted from the corpus of Academy of Persian language and literature. The study showed that the interaction of negation prefix with the modal verbs of possibility domain (i.e., tavanestan, shodan, momken budan and emkan dashtan) is “regular” in the sense that there is correspondence between the form and meaning of the negative modal verbs. Thus, a negative modal form negates the modality and a negative main verb negates the proposition. In the necessity domain, the interaction of lazem budan with negation prefix is, also, “regular”. In fact, the co-occurrence of negation prefix with bayestan negates the proposition (not the modality). In addition, bayestan cannot express the epistemic “lack of necessity” of the truth of a proposition and deontic lack of necessity for actualization of an action. Other modal verbs (e.g., lazem budan and modal verbs of the possibility domain) express these notions through “modal suppletion” or “logical suppletion” strategies. Bayestan is a “uniscopal” modal form interacting only with “narrow scope” negation while other modal verbs investigated in this study are “biscopal” as they interact with both narrow and wide scope negation. Except bayestan, for which “modal suppletion” and “logical suppletion” strategies are employed to express wide scope negation, for other verbs investigated in this research “negation placement” strategy is used to distinguish between narrow and wide scope negation.

Keywords

References

Akhlaghi, F. 200). bayestan, shodan and tavanestan: three modal verbs in the contemporary Persian, Farhangetan Letter Journal, 3 (3). 132-82. [In Persian].
Coates, J. 198). The Semantics of the Modal Auxiliaries. London and Canberra: Croom Helm.
De Haan, F. 1997. the interaction of modality and negation: a typological study. Routledge: London & New York.
Depraetere, I., & Reed, S. 2020. Mood and modality in English. In The handbook of English linguistics (2nd edition), 207-227. Wiley.
Depraetere, Ilse .2017. On the pragmatics of modal verbs. Selected papers on theoretical and applied linguistics, 22, 14-26.
Halliday, M. A. K. & Ch. M. I. M. Matthiessen .2014. Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. London and New York: Routledge.
Homayoonfar, M. 2012. investigation of the grammaticalization process in the Persian modal verbs based on Leman’s parameters. Dastoor Journal, 9, 50-73. [In Persian].
Huddleston, R. & Pullum, G. K. (Eds.) .2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: CUP.
Ilkhanipour, N,. & Karimi Doostan, Gh. 2015. lexicalization of the semantic aspects of modality in Persian modal adjectives. Language Research, 8 (19). 65-87. [In Persian].
Karimi Doostan, GH & Ilkhanipour, N. 2011. Modality System in Persian, Linguistic Research, 3 (1), 77-98. [In Persian].
Kratzer, Angelika 2012. Modals and Conditionals: New and Revised Perspectives. Oxford: OUP.
Lyons, J. 1977. Semantics (Vol. 2). CUP.
Medadian, GH. 202). subjectivity as a context-dependent semantic dimension and scalarity of modality in Persian. Language Research, 13 (39), 147-183. [In Persian].
Medadian, Gh, Nezhadansari Mahabadi, D. & Barati, H. 2017. an explicit classification of  non-epistemic senses of the modal verbs tavanestan, shodan and bayestan based on Depraetere’s semantic-pragmatic model. Language Research, 10 (28), 115-148. [In Persian]
Nuyts, J. 2001. Epistemic modality, language, and conceptualization: Cognitive-pragmatic perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Palmer, F. R. 1995. Negation and the modals of possibility and necessity. In Bybee, J. and Fleischman, S. Modality in grammar and discourse (pp. 453-471). John Benjamins: Amsterdam & Philadelphia.
Palmer, F. R. 2001. Mood and modality. Cambridge university press.
Palmer, Frank R. 1990. Modality and the English Modals. 2nd edition. London: Longman.
Rahimian, J. 2008. the formal and semantic aspects of Persian modal forms in modalized sentences. Linguistics and Dialetcs of Khorasan, 1, 75-91. [In Persian].
Rahimian, J. & Amouzadeh, M. 2012. Modal verbs in Persian language and expression of modality. Linguistic Research, 4 (1), 21-40. [In Persian].
Rahmani Parhizkar, Z., Golfam, A. & Afrashi, A. 201). the study of modality schema of Persian: a cognitive approach. Journal of Western Iranian Languages and Dialects, 1 (4), 101-118. [In Persian].
Rezae, V. & Nisani, M. 2015. Differentiating Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality Based on the Behavior of Persian Adverbials, Linguistic Studies, 7 (1), 37-56. [In Persian].
Salkie, R. (2009). Degrees of modality. In Raphael Salkie, Pierre Busuttil and Johan van der Auwera, Modality in English: Theory and description, vol. 58, (pp.79-103). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Shaghaghi, V. 2001. Negation prefix in Persian. Dastoor Journal, 5 (4). 85-96. [In Persian].
Sharifi, SH. & Sabouri, N. 202). A Semantic Survey on Modal Verbs in Todays' Persian Language from a Typological Point of View. Journal of Researches in Linguistics, 13 (1), 217-230. [In Persian].
Tavangar, M., & Amouzadeh, M. 200). Subjective modality and tense in Persian. Language Sciences, 31(6), 853-873.
van der Auwera, J. 1996. Modality: the three-layered scalar square. Journal of semantics, 13(3), 181-195.
van der Auwera, J., & Plungian, V. A. 1998. Modality’s semantic map. Linguistic Typology, 2, 79–124.
Language Research
Volume 13, Issue 1 - Serial Number 24
November 2022
Pages 109-138

Files

History

  • Receive Date: 16 September 2022
  • Revise Date: 21 November 2022
  • Accept Date: 05 November 2022
  • First Publish Date: 05 November 2022

Share

How to cite

Statistics