Курсовая работа: The system of English verbs
Epistemic – speakers express their judgment about the factual status of the proposition
Speculative: expresses uncertainty
Deductive: expresses inferences from observable data
Assumptive: expresses inferences from what is generally known
Evidential: speakers give evidence for the factual status of the proposition
Reported – evidence gathered from others
Sensory: evidence gathered through sense perception, e.g., seen, heard
Event modality
Deontic: speakers express conditioning factors that are external to the relevant individual
Permissive: permission is given on the basis of some authority, e.g. rules, law, or the speaker
Obligative: an obligation is laid on the addressee(s), also on the basis of some authority
Commissive: a speaker commits himself to do something; the expression may be a promise or a threat
Dynamic: speakers express conditioning factors that are internal to the relevant individual
Abilitive: expresses the ability to do something
Volitive: expresses the willingness to do something
These notional categories are discussed and illustrated throughout the book.
The illustrative data reveal many of the formal means for expressing the notional categories in a variety of languages. According to Palmer, three grammatical categories predominate in the expression of the notional categories: (1) affixation of verbs, (2) modal verbs, and (3) particles. Many of the languages from which Palmer chose data use more than one grammatical category to express the notions.
This is probably not unusual. In fact, the two Austronesian languages with which I am most familiar spread the notions across all three grammatical categories, and the lexical and morphosyntactic patterns are completely unlike English patterns, although the similarity of notions is fairly obvious. I would expect to see a closer correlation of the grammatical means of expessing modality among related languages.
Palmer discusses the use of modal verbs and their association with possibility and necessity in chapter 4. He draws together issues involving epistemic modality, i.e., a speaker’s attitude to the truth value or factual status of a proposition in contrast to deontic and dynamic modality that refer to unactualized events. Although notionally there is a difference, Palmer explains that in English and many other languages, the same modal verbs are used for both types. He gives three English sentences as examples:
(1) He may come tomorrow.
(2) The book should be on the shelf.
(3) He must be in his office.
He states that each of the modal verbs in the sentences can express either epistemic or deontic modality. However, he goes on to say in a later section that there are some formal differences: deontic must and may can be negated whereas epistemic must and may cannot be; if may and must are followed by have in a clause, they always express epistemic modality, never deontic; another formal difference between may and must is that deontic may is replaceable by can and would still express deontic modality, but if replaced by can’t it would then likely express epistemic modality, i.e., a truth value. This type of illustration and explanation is used throughout the book.
Palmer discusses the links between mood and modal systems with particular respect to languages that express mood formally, or in combination with modal notions. Although Palmer suggests that there is basically no typological difference between indicative/subjunctive and realis/irrealis since both are instances of mood, he does state that there are considerable differences between the functions of what have been labeled «subjunctive» and «irrealis» For that reason he deals with them in three separate chapters.
Although Palmer’s notional categories make sense, I found that it was difficult to process the grammatical patterns in the language data used to illustrate the categories. Part of my difficulty may be attributed to the fact that I believe modality needs to be studied in the context of use, i.e., natural texts, not isolated sentences; and also, I believe, that a thorough study of all grammatical expressions of modality and mood must be done within a single language before the results are compared and contrasted cross-linguistically. Perhaps the authors of the papers and grammars that Palmer used had done just that, but the contexts were lost through the excerpting of sentences to illustrate his notional categories.
In spite of this criticism, I found Palmer’s categories, his compilation of data from many different languages, and explanations of terminological usage very helpful in my own work, as well as thought provoking. I wholeheartedly recommend the book for your reference shelf, particularly if you are a linguist or translator who needs to do an in-depth study of modality in a single language or a cross-language comparison of modality.
In his preface, the author explains that this volume is a complement to an earlier
volume, titled An Empirical Grammar of the English Verb: Modal Verbs, published in 1995 by the same publisher. The present volume clearly aims to provide an inventory of the various verb combinations within the English verb phrase. This is done on the basis of the study of a large amount of corpus data. I am not so sure whether the term grammar in the title is entirely justified, for even though information about distribution and frequency of occurrence of the various patterns is provided, the book hardly ever goes beyond providing this kind of information. The author writes in his introduction that «all instances of verbs and verb phrases can be explained as cases of rule-governed grammatical behavior,» but what these rules are is not explained anywhere. I will come back to this below.
The book definitely has a number of strong points, but it also has quite a number of serious shortcomings. Let me first discuss the general contents of the book. It is divided into seven chapters: «Introduction» «General Categories» «Verb Forms».