Jordan Chark
Issues in Modal Force: The View from Finnish
In this talk, I discuss the lexical semantics of modal auxiliaries in Finnish, focusing on the deontic. A growing body of research on variable-force modality has greatly widened our understanding of how modal domains may be shaped (Kratzer 2012; Rullmann et al. 2008; Deal 2011). Modal force is widely divided into two categories, strong and weak; von Fintel and Iatridou (2008) propose that weak necessity modals employ a secondary ordering source, which imposes domain restriction and results in logical weakening. In Finnish, diagnostics for weak necessity break down to some extent and pose problems for existing theoretical accounts. For instance, speakers report clear intuitions regarding the strength relationship between two necessity modals, placing täytyä as stronger than pitää. Furthermore, conditional-mood marking is licit on modals, where it has a weakening effect akin to that ascribed to counterfactual marking triggering a weak necessity interpretation cross-linguistically (ibid.). The following research questions will be addressed: i) How does the Finnish modal system fit into the typology of modal force? ii) What is the contribution of conditional marking to the interpretation of Finnish deontics? iii) Does Finnish support a (strictly) domain-restriction based account distinguishing between strong and weak necessity? What does this tell us about modal scales more generally?