A Relevance-Theoretic Approach To English Modality

In the linguistics literature, it is widely acknowledged that modal expressions may be used to communicate at least two broad clusters of meanings: epistemic modal meanings, which roughly deal with the possibility or necessity of an inference drawn from available evidence, and deontic modal meanings, concerned with the necessity or possibility of acts performed by morally responsible agents, e.g. obligation and permission.The traditional division of modality into epistemic and deontic reveals some interesting phenomena in which the same form can be used for both types of modality. From semantic angle, some linguists previously attempt to analyze the reason for the ambiguity of modality meaning and describe the meaning of modality interpretation in terms of purely polysemic words.Adopting the relevance theory and via four representative English modal verbs (can, may, must, should), I want to present a new perspective on the lexical structure of English modal verbs and their interaction with pragmatic implications that determine the utterance and comprehension of modality. According to the relevance theory, the output of the grammar-driven process of decoding a linguistic string (i.e. the logical form of the utterance) is a configuration of conceptual addresses and this logical form grossly underdetermines what the speaker has said. In order to arrive at the proposition expressed by the speaker's utterance, the hearer has to perform a series of operations which lie beyond his semantic, or indeed linguistic, competence.My basic claim is that the English modals have unitary semantic content which, in conjunction with different pragmatic considerations, gives rise to an array of distinct contextual readings. Modal expressions in natural language mostly express incomplete or otherwise underspecified contents and these contents need to be pragmatically manipulated to yield the rich modal concepts which formally support inference.