A Sign-Based Analysis of Must, May and Could
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Lauren Whitty [1]
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[1] CUNY Graduate Center, Linguistics, New York City, NY, USA
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- Localización: Word: Journal of the International Linguistic Association, ISSN-e 2373-5112, ISSN 0043-7956, Vol. 69, Nº 4, 2023, págs. 299-316
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
This paper analyzes the English forms must, may and could using a Columbia School framework. As with previous sign-based analyses of the modals, must, may and could are considered members of a grammatical system; this paper posits a grammatical system of Likelihood, whereby the meanings of must, may and could are relative to one another. These signs are first examined in a text from Malcolm Gladwell [2019. Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know. Boston, MA: Little, Brown] which provides rich context for meaning analysis, and later, the hypothesized meanings are tested in a large corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) [Davies, Mark. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/]. Through the testing of the observed occurrence patterns within COCA, must, may and could show a general pattern of usage which supports the proposed meaning hypotheses.
