 Milky wrote: |
<In which case (just to clarify), in your view, no BrE speaker could use the following sentences in a subjective sense: >
I wouldn't say that no BrEng speaker could ever do that. Grammaticalization, in the form of AmEng usage, is rapidly taking hold of some parts BrEng usage. |
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We'll come back to grammaticalization. First, let's look again at the Thompson-Palmer hypothesis:
Exhibit A: "…Deontically, must obliges the subject of the sentence to do something (you must be home before 9
o’clock). …"
Exhibit B: "…When an obligation is clearly speaker-oriented, must is a clear choice…"
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Which together imply, as we've already agreed, that "must" (in Thompson-Palmer's view) reflects an obligation imposed by the speaker on the subject.
Thompson-Palmer also says:
Exhibit C: "…When an obligation is clearly external, the choice is have to…"
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Now a few posts ago, you presented this example of a "bouletic modal":
1. I am your father and I say you have to go to bed in 5 minutes.
Suppose we were to turn this into an examination question, and ask a BrE-studying ESL student to decide whether to use "must" or "have to":
2. I am your father and I say you ________ go to bed in 5 minutes.
Let
A +
B +
C (above) = the Thompson-Palmer Modal Filter.
Our student applies
A and
B.
Clearly, the subject ("you") of the modal clause is obliged to go to bed. Moreover, the obligation is just as clearly "speaker-oriented": the father specifies both his own authority ("I am your father") and the fact that it is he ("I say") who is imposing the obligation and no one else. In which case, "
must is a clear choice". Done and dusted.
As a formality, our student then applies
C. Bewilderment ensues. Isn't the obligation "external" to the subject? Of course it is: it originates with the father.
But no,
C can't mean that: if it did, we would have to change "must" to "have to" in every sentence of this kind:
3. You must give up devising examples of modal sentences.
since the obligation is almost always external to the 2nd person subject. Which would be absurd.
So
C must mean that "have to" reflects an obligation external to both subject and speaker, i.e. one that is imposed by a third party and merely reported by the speaker. Thus
C does not apply in this case. We can stick with "must".
But our student is a cautious fellow. He decides to look up "bouletic". By chance, he lights upon
http://mit.edu/fintel/www/modality.pdf, which helpfully informs him that "bouletic modality…concerns what is possible or necessary, given a person's desires."
"Given a person's desires": that certainly tallies with
A and
B.
But then, to his horror, he discovers the following sentence on the same page:
4. You have to go to bed in ten minutes. [stern father; bouletic]
You
have to go to bed? But isn't that
C? An obligation that is "clearly external"? So who is doing the imposing? The father is "stern", after all; and what about those "desires"? But the answer can't be "either", surely?
Feverishly our student considers the possible explanations:
i) The father may
appear "stern"; but in fact, he's the abject puppet of his wife, who has scripted and rehearsed the entire incident to the very last detail.
ii) The father in #1 is in some sense reporting on the obligation he has imposed, and thus somehow presenting himself as a third party; in which case, since the obligation is pseudo-external, "the choice is
have to". (But then, what about #4?)
iii) Thompson and Palmer are wrong: it isn't true that "must" is always "speaker-oriented", and "have to" is "clearly external".
iv) The "have to"/"must" distinction doesn't apply to sentences like #1 and #4, for some reason.
v) The author of #1 and #4 is American. They do things differently there. A BrE-speaker would never under any circumstances utter such grisly concoctions.
vi) He has misunderstood something, somewhere.
vii) His professor has misunderstood something, somewhere.
What do we say to our student, Milky?
MrP