Search results for 'tag:Constructions tag:Modals' matching tags 'Constructions' and 'Modals'

Re: there had to be

CalifJim — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 07:23:43 GMT

pructus
a past tense subjunctive referring to the present, like, "You could be right."

This is a modal construction (could), not a subjunctive.

Here's a subjunctive (underlined): It is important that you be right.

I'm not sure what you're asking, I guess.

Re: the middle voice option

Dawnstorm — Tue, 27 May 2008 08:09:34 GMT

Hi,

I'm really enjoying this. You're making me think.

I'm going to take your points out of sequence. I think I'm still replying to your post; if I misrepresent what you're saying, please correct me.

First, the summary of what I'm going to say: A lot depends on theory, and how you frame your terms. To me, ergativity in English is primarily a side topic to voice, and the only "marked" voice in English is the passive. All others rely on semantics and indirect evidence (such as your very detailled and useful post about the transitivity system in English). BUT: how do you frame the evidence there is systematically? In syntax? Make it part of the lexicon? In other words, what exactly is it that the term "ergative" adds to a combination of transitivity and lexical tagging? I'm still thinking about your suggestion to speak of "ergative structures" rather than "ergative verbs". This is an interesting approach, de-emphasising the lexicon in that respect; but I'm trying to ignore it for this post, mostly because I'm not done thinking it through.

Second, I think I've used the term "semantic" very loosely in my other post. There's reference, and then there's cognitive framing. (Or content and point of view.) The cognitive framing is harder to get at and interpret, mostly because these things aren't always immediately visible. We're talking about "ergative structures" in English, or the "middle voice", because we've noticed these constructions in other languages (Basque for ergativity; Ancient Greek for Middle voice; etc.). That is we have to strip away the structure and get down to the point-of-view meaning that the structures imply. And then we have to go back to English and look for expressions of said point-of-view meaning in this language. (Something similar is going on when linguists are probing "shall/will" along the lines of futurity/modality, within the discussion whether English has a future tense or not. The consensus is it doesn't, but the discussion - assuming "will/shall" as tense-modals - has been productive, if not conclusive.) But the thing is this: if you're bringing concepts to a language from outside (which is usual in comparative linguistics) you need an anchor; conventional structural methods - such as your "what syntactic operations yield well-formed usage?" approach - have their limitations. So do semantic (referential or framing). This makes ergativity/unaccusativity hard to think about, before you choose your approach.

Examples follow:

This is about the sentence, "He died a cruel death."

MrPedantic
The object here is a cognate object (it is implied in the verb itself) and thus belongs to a slightly different model. (I would say that it only exists to provide an adverbial opportunity: "he died a cruel death" = "he died in a cruel way".)

I agree that, framing-wise, the object functions much like an adverbial. But it's an "object" in syntax, which has implications that are incompatible with adverbials. Most relevant, here, "die" is now prone to passivisation.

"A cruel death was died," does sound odd (I'll get to it in a minute), but I wouldn't bat an eyelid at "Many deaths were died that night." Interestingly, it's hard to put this into the active voice, mostly because no subject seems appropriate. (?"The Soldiers died many deaths that night."; ?"The army died many deaths that night."...). To me, all the examples I can think of (plural nouns, collective nouns...) don't express the passive meaning. The closest I come is "Many people died that night." Anything else I can think of is of questionable grammaticality.

However, "A cruel death was died," although it sounds odd, doesn't sound ungrammatical in the least (at least not to me). It's also not a semantic problem; I understand the sentence perfectly well, both reference- and framingwise.

The reason, I think, this sounds odd is a pragmatic one. I think this one sounds odd because it's hard to find a context for this utterance that justifies the passive, which is a "marked construction". You generally expect "marked" constructions to be there for a reason. I suspect in the right context the above sentence would be perfectly fine. (It's a matter of Grice's conversational maxims, the maxim of manner, in particular.)

This is where the "frame-semantics" of syntactic constructions become complicated, I think. How do language structures tie in with cognitive structures (e.g. To what extent do we buy the Sapir-Worf hypothesis?)

So, from this I go to self-observation:

MrPedantic
and precisely because of that distinction, I would call "break" here ergative (ex. 5) , and "die" unaccusative (ex. 2).

See, I had the hardest time even to grasp what that meant, not now in this thread, but when I first discovered the distinction. That's because, learning English, I didn't train to see the difference. It wasn't necessary, as ergativity/unaccusativity isn't expressed through syntactic structures, but only indirectly through what operations are possible on the verb; this I pretty much took care off either through lexical list-tagging, or through collocation. If there is a hidden logic to it that I applied in learning, it never became conscious. (It's quite possible that I had a practical knowledge, but no discoursive one of this subject; but why, then, is it so hard to grasp?)

If we go back to the list and sift through the operations there, we'll find that "die" behaves different from "break" in the way we specified. But here's the catch: to apply that structural method, we have to assume that "break" in 5.a = "break" in 5.b = "break" in 5.c etc.; i.e. that "break" is the same lexical item in all these instances. That's because syntax has a hard time to differentiate between "signifier" and "signified", or "sign" and "concept".

Notice, for example, how your 5.a is already the transitive, while systematically it should be the intransitive agentive: 5.a *He broke. (i.e. "He caused/performed the action of breaking." as opposed to "He underwent the process of breaking," which is 5.b, now, and would be 5.c)

So I'd amend this, to:

5a. *He broke.

5b. He broke the plate

5c. The plate broke.

5d. The plate was broken.

5e. The broken plate

5f. The plate broke easily

And the comparison with "die" would be two-fold:

1. = sign; 2. = concept

5.1a He died.

5.2a He killed.

5.1b *He died the man.

5.2b He killed the man

5.1c The man died.

5.2c *The man killed.

5.1d *The man was died.

5.2d The man was killed.

5.1e *The died man [cf. The dead man.]

5.2e The killed man.

5.1f The man died easily. (<-- What's the difference to 5.1a? Should I add an * before it, as this is out of place, here?)

5.2f *The man killed easily. (<-- Is this not available, because 5.1f is available?)

5.1a, 5.1c, and 5.1f seem to be much the same. And this is the problem I have systematising a structural comparison. One possibility, I see is to re-cast 5a as reflexive 1. *He died himself./2. He killed himself. I might try to justify this through dying being a process you undergo, thus if you add an agentive/causative to core meaning (which is not in slot a, but in slot c) the verb becomes by necessity reflexive ("He caused himself to die.")

But these things are all a bit... tentative. I fear it's more rationalised than rational, if you get my drift.

[Interesting aside: you used the term "anticausative" alongside "ergative" and "unaccusative" for break in your thread. Bears repeating, as it's something I'm also still thinking about; a very interesting concept I haven't come across yet.]

MrPedantic
But I find a semantic difference too: the first presents the sign from the point of view of the reader, and the second, from the point of view of the writer.

Now, that's an interesting observation. I'd argue that the semantic difference is not referential (it refers to the same state of affairs), but it's a framing difference. If we view the sign as a proxy for the agent, we're importing the difference of active vs. voice into a construction that's free of the syntactic properties that normally accompany this framing device in English. "Reads," then, is ergative, while "says is a straightforward accusative verb (one that takes the accusative (which isn't marked in English - except, perhaps, for pronouns, where it's indistinguishable - morphologically - from the dative; the conventional term would be "direct object").

MrPedantic
Also, although the same few verbs tend to recur as examples in these discussions, actual usage is more imaginative.

That's what makes language so fascinating, isn't it? Nice example, there, too.

Re: bare-infinitive vs. to-infinitive

Anonymous — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:04:52 GMT

In Old English there was a real infinitive (bare) -- e.g. "fremman" (to do) -- and the "inflected infinitive" -- "to fremmenne" (in order to do). The bare infinitive was used with auxiliaries/modals much as it still is, while the inflected infinitive was used to express purpose and a wide variety of constructions similar to today's. The bare infinitive precedes the inflected variety, the forerunner of today's "to- infinitive". "Help" with another verb has a slightly modal sense which may explain why it can be used without "to".

Verbs

ganesh77 — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 09:38:41 GMT

The list isn't meant to be exhaustive or carefully arranged. Any additions, corrections or further examples would be welcomed.

1 main verbs; lexical verbs (all verbs which are not auxiliaries or modals)

2 action verbs; event verbs; dynamic verbs (a verb which can be used in continuous tenses) i.e. eat, run, talk

3 state of being verbs; existence verbs; state verbs; stative verbs; static verbs (a verb which describes a state and is not usually used in a continuous tense) i.e. be, own, know

4 regular verbs (a verb that has four forms and follows the normal rules)

5 irregular verbs; strong verbs (a verb not following the normal rules for inflection)

6 auxiliary and modal verbs (which make up verbal phrases) â 23 in total

7 linking verbs; copulative verbs; copulas (a verb which links the subject and complement of a clause) i.e. It is warm today.

8 transitive verbs (a verb used to talk about an action or event that involves more than one person or thing, and so is followed by an object) i.e. Sheâs wasting her money.

9 intransitive verbs (a verb used to talk about an action or event that only involved the subject and so has no object) i.e. She arrived.

10 multiword verbs

a type 1 â intransitive [phrasal verbs; adverb particle

b type 2 â transitive (inseparable) [prepositional verbs; preposition particles]

c type 3 â transitive (separable) [phrasal verbs; adverb particle]

d type 4 â transitive (with two inseparable particles) [phrasal-prepositional verbs; first particle is an adverb, second particle is a preposition]

11 compound verbs

12 delexical verbs (a verb which has very little meaning in itself but is used with an object to describe an action) i.e. She gave a small cry.

13 ditransitive verbs (a verb which can have both a direct and indirect object) i.e. She gave me a kiss.

14 ergative verbs (a verb which can be used transitively to focus on the performer of the action, or intransitively to focus on the thing affected by the action) i.e. He boiled the water. The water boiled.

15 reporting verbs; performance verbs; performative verbs (a verb used with a quote or a reported clause to describe what people say or think) i.e. suggest, say, wonder

16 reciprocal verbs (a verb which describes an action involving two people doing the same thing to each other) i.e. They met in the street.

17 reflexive verbs (a verb which is typically used with a reflexive pronoun) i.e. Donât cut yourself with that knife.

18 defective verbs (a verb without all the inflected forms of a regular verb) i.e. modals

19 finite and non-finite

a infinitives

b gerunds; verbal nouns

c participles

20 catenative verbs (a verb that takes other verb forms as objects; found at the head of a series of linked constructions) i.e. We agreed to try to decide to stop eating snacks.

21 causative verbs (a verb that designates the action necessary to cause another action to happen) i.e. The devil made me do it.

Re: the purpose of would have+p.p.

Avangi — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 01:07:33 GMT

CalifJim
That would be Della's car. ~ That is probably Della's car. That is most likely Della's car.
That would have been Della's car. ~ That was probably Della's car. That was most likely Della's car.

CJ

Hi Jim,

Don't know anything about "modals", and this probably begs the question, but my sense of this construction has always been that there's absolutely no doubt in the mind of the speaker. He knows something which is unknown to the person or group he's addressing. Based either on information they've given him, or on facts evident to them all, he makes an induction of which he is sure. The reason "is" or "was" doesn't apply is because it's not necessarily evident to the group he's addressing, although he could have chosen "is" or "was."

My question is, is doubt an essential quality of the construction in current usage, and if so, is it doubt in the mind of the speaker or some kind of logical doubt based on context - or something else?

It would be different if he said, "I think/believe that would be Della's car.

Best regards, - A.

Re: Modal forms

Marius Hancu — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 22:52:35 GMT

OK, we consulted with friends and they proposed the following:

He may have arrived here by 5 o'clock tomorrow.

He may have been waiting for us an hour by the time our train
finally arrives.

He may have been waiting an hour by the time our train
finally arrives.

Thus no one seems really surprised by such constructions.

Re: Adverb in perfect tense construction & split infinitive

Mister Micawber — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 06:41:17 GMT

It was my (unconscious) option. I think the modal is more formal.

Re: Adverb in perfect tense construction & split infinitive

Believer — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 05:49:32 GMT

Thank you, Mr.M.

In your previous responding post, you wrote:

The 'rule' against splitting infinitives is long defunct; it need be observed only if your teacher insists on it in his/her assignments or tests.

What is the facor involved in deciding which way to write your partial sentence?

it need be observed only if ... (I think this is a modal form)

it needs to be observed only if ... (I think this isn't a modal form)

How to say using modal verb?

Fandorin — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 22:39:41 GMT

"How can I continue work any longer?"

"How can I shall be working any longer?"

or simply: "How can I work any longer?"

I want to relate it to the future. I will be very grateful for help. Which of these construction are correct or not? Thanks a lot.

Re: Easy but long...)))

Yankee — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 16:20:51 GMT

Hi Pres1dent

You should break up long posts such as this one into several short posts. That way it's much easier for other people to comment.

I've made suggestions. Some of the sentences in these exercises don't sound terribly natural, so there are also suggestions in places where there were no asterisks (**).

I. Grammar Exercises
1 Articles
1. *(The)* equipment of from Blake & Co is very good. They sell it to ** various different companies
2. Where are *the* newspapers? They are on *the* desk.
3. There is ** ~~much~~ a lot of built-in furniture in our kitchen. *The* furniture makes *the* kitchen comfortable.
4. We are interested in buying ** the/ - machines from British companies.
5. *The* tools of Blake & Co tools are of ** high quality.
6. We~~âve~~ received *~~the~~ an* enquiry for ** three machines ~~lately~~ recently.
7. ** Last month our manager went to St. Petersburg by train. He ~~went there by~~ took *an * express train. *The* train had no stops.
8. If you want to get accommodation(s) at *a *hotel in Nice in the summertime you must reserve *the* room in advance. ** Nice hotels are full during the summer ~~time~~.
9. The seller didnât agree to give us *a* discount as their goods were in *a* great demand at that price.
10. We are interested in buying ** compressors for *a* new shop in *~~the~~* a large plant in Siberia. *The* shop is already under construction and the customers requires the goods urgently, as they must complete the construction of the shop by the end of the year.

2 Prepositions
1. She is sitting *on at* the table and ~~speaking~~ talking *on* the phone. She is making an appointment on for Friday.
2. They met Mr. Black *in* his office. The meeting began at 10 oâclock and lasted ** ~~(for?)~~ two hours.
3. *The* other day Rossexport received an enquiry for the motors of Johanson & Sons.
4. The train will arrive with a delay ~~for~~ of 40 minutes. Will you go to the departure lounge and wait for the announcement?
5. -Can you give us a discount *for/on* a large order?
- As we have done a lot of business with you, we can give you a small discount.
- In that case, weâd like to have a discount of 7%.
6. The charge for a room in this hotel is not very high.
7. They offered to deliver the pumps *in* ~~(of?)~~ four lots of 12 pumps each in at regular intervals of 5 months. (at regular 5-month intervals)
8. Youâve reserved a single and a double room ~~for you~~ for two nights on the fourth floor. These are modern rooms with private baths. They donât face the street.
9. -Iâd like a suit for office wear.
-Try *on/-* this one in for size. (OR: Try this one on for size.)
10. The seller offered the goods *at* CIF terms and payment collection. (This sounds clunky. I'd just say this: The seller offered the goods CIF.)

3 Degrees of comparison
1. The Sony TV set is more expensive than the Akai TV set. Itâs one of the most expensive TV sets.
2. Are our cars as convenient as German cars? (In my opinion, reliable would be a more logical choice of words.)
3. This is the busiest airport Iâve ever seen.
4. I come later on Mondays ~~later~~ than on other days.
5. ~~*More often*~~ we give a discount to buyers most often if we have known them for a long time.

4Verb times
1. Now you *see* Mr. Black in his office. During the day he *looks* through English newspapers and *discusses* business matters. Now he is reading a letter. Later, he *is going to phone* the manager of the company.
2. -What model are you interested in?
-Model BC5 *meets* our requirement.
3. The fact *is* I sent you our offer last week. In my letter I asked you to study it and give us your answer but we havenât received it yet.
4. -*Will* the plane to Moscow leaves on time? /Will the plane to Moscow be leaving on time?
-There is a delay but it probably *wonât be* over 30 minutes
5. Good morning, Mr. Black. Iâm glad to see you. I havenât seen you since we met in London
6. How long *~~it takes~~* (will it take?) me to get there?
-Itâll take you about half an hour to get there at this time of the day. There is a lot of traffic now. Look, bus 79A *is coming.*
7. Have you discussed the terms of delivery yet?
8. Jack arrived at the theatre about 7 oâclock. Ten minutes later he was sitting in the stalls and watching the performance.
9. Rossexport started shipping the goods nine months after we *(had) signed* the contract. (Past perfect is OK, but not necessary.)
10. I donât know when our accountant ~~comes~~ will be back

5Reported speech It's often difficult to judge reported speech without also knowing what the direct speech was.

1. Mr. Black said it hadnât taken us? long to discuss the price. (It sounds as though the sentence need 'them' rather than 'us'.)
2. The office manager said you would go ~~on business~~ to London on business soon.
3. Mr. Black asked if Mr. Taylor was staying with us.
4. Mr. Black wants to know what discount Mr. Smith can give us(?).
5. Mr. Black said your prices were very high and they couldnât accept them.
6. Mr. Black asked who Mr. Brown was waiting for.
7. Mr. Black wanted to know if Nancy had translated the letter.
8. Mr. Black says to look through the quotation from Dunn & Co.
9. Mr. Black said not to send the fax to Smith & Co.
10. Mr. Black asked if their goods met Mr. Smithâs requirements.

6Modal verbs
1. Can I offer you a cup of tea?
2. -~~Must~~ Do I have to go to the office every day?
-No, you ~~mustnât~~ don't.
3. -~~May~~ Can I invite businessmen to the conference room?
-No, you ~~mustnât (or mightnât?)~~ can't. It ~~must~~ has to be cleaned.
4. When can you look through it?
5. -Why are you so late?
-Because I had to phone the British company.
6. -Why did Mr. Smith go to London last month?
-He was/had to sign a contract there.
7. If the manager doesnât have to stay late at the head office today, he will be able to meet Mr. Smith
8. We received your offer 5 days ago ~~wand~~ but we ~~couldnât~~ haven't been able to study it (yet).
9. Who can make good coffee?
10. You are to contact Black & Co next Monday.