Polysemy Of English Modality: A Mental-space Theoretic Analysis

The study of modality can be traced back to ancient Greece, when Aristotle focuses his discussions on the notions of necessity, possibility, and impossibility, as well as the relations which may be perceived to exist between them. Ever since then a great many scholars appear to tap this topic from different angles, such as philosophy, logic, cognition and linguistics. The development of modern linguistics witnessed the growing interest of researchers on this topic at home and abroad. Linguists have done extensive researches on modality from various perspectives, such as Quirk's study of traditional grammar, Lyons' semantic study, and Levinson's pragmatic study.In the linguistics literature, it is widely acknowledged that modal expressions may be used to communicate at least two broad clusters of meanings: deontic modal meanings, which are concerned with the necessity or possibility of acts performed by morally responsible agents, e.g. obligation and permission, and epistemic modal meanings, roughly dealt with the possibility or necessity of an inference drawn from available evidence or premise. This traditional division of English modality into deontic and epistemic use just reveals that the sense relationship of English modality is polysemy. From the semantic perspective, some scholars, such as Lyons, Palmer and Sweetser, attempt to describe the meaning of modal interpretation in terms of polysemic relationship.Cognitive linguistics, as a new approach, is the study of language based on our experience of the world and the way we perceive and conceptualize it and the study of the human language with consciousness knowledge (Ungerer & Schmid, 1996), which provides us a new model to review and understand language. And cognitive linguistics also takes an interest in the study of English modality. Talmy (1988) firstly enumerates modality from the cognitive perspective. He suggests that the semantic of root modality is best understood in terms of force dynamics, that is in terms of our linguistic treatment of forces and barriers in general. Sweetser (1990) steps further on the basis of Talmy's study. She states that root-modal meanings are extended to the epistemic domain precisely because we generally use the language of the external world to apply to the internal mental world, which is metaphorically structured as parallel to that external world (Sweetser, 1990: 49-51). This thesis, within the framework of mental-space theory proposed by Gilles Fauconnier (1985) and Talmy's analysis of English modality on the basis of force dynamics, follows a unitary approach to the interpretation of English modal verbs from synchronic perspective, and tentatively proposes a mental-space structure of the basic semantics of MUST, MAY, CAN, SHOULD, and WILL, which can be applied to better understand the meaning relationship in the English modality, which claims that the deontic use and epistemic use of English modality are not separated, but are closely related with each other through metaphorical mapping.