Talk:English modal auxiliary verbs

How to pronunce modals

Don't know. Check Google. 122.173.26.135 (talk) 06:30, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Permissive or mandatory may or might in present usage

This is a helpful article. I've found few resources on modal verbs which have been so convincing.

I would modify the following paragraph if I felt an adjustment would be less intrusive. The text says:

May can indicate presently given permission for present or future actions: You may go now. Might used in this way is milder: You might go now if you feel like it.

I can think of no occasion when anyone would use those as permissive, though clearly they started that way. You may go now is (and probably always has been) a command to go. You might go now is a social hint which similarly demands someone's withdrawal. Neither appears to retain any practical aspect of permission. The person being addressed has no alternative but to immediately leave.

I would be grateful for advice. JohnHarris (talk) 10:08, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

Cb6, my advice would be to use COCA and its co-corpora. Thinking that leave would have pretty much the same meanings as go in you may go/leave but not have such an overwhelming number of hits, I asked COCA for you may leave, and quickly landed on the following, seemingly part of an (of course fictional) classroom dialogue between pupil and teacher in the film Indignation:

Sir, I respectfully ask your permission to stand up and leave now, because I am afraid if I don't, I am going to be sick.

Of course you may leave. I just ask that you reflect on why leaving appears to be the only way you are dealing with your problems here.

(My emphasis.) I don't see any demand here.

Incidentally, I didn't write the part that you quote, and I may well rewrite it some time over winter. -- Hoary (talk) 22:16, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

I certainly see your point. I think there are two environments where the phrase "you may leave" might appear. One is in conversation, as in your example. The other is an unaccompanied statement, the context I had in mind. As a statement it is invariably a command. Your example's context, by contrast, is that permission is being granted but the teacher believes the pupil is objecting to the lesson's moral content rather than signifying a digestive upset, which the pupil immediately confirms at length. What neither of them know is that he has appendicitis. I appreciate your distinguishing between the direction of a superior on the one hand and conversational use on the other, which hadn't occurred to me before your reply.JohnHarris (talk) 01:09, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

Supposed disallowance

Somewhere in this set of edits Drmies added

Two rules from different grammatical models supposedly disallow the construction. Proponents of Phrase structure grammar see the surface clause as allowing only one modal verb, while main verb analysis would dictate that modal verbs occur in finite forms.

(citing Di Paolo).

That (and much else) got scrambled 53 weeks later, by some IP who didn't know what they were doing. The result makes no sense to me. Like so much crap in Wikipedia, it lived on.

Here's what Di Paolo writes:

In general, there have been two main approaches for ruling out such sequences of modals [as in "I could must do that"]: the phrase-structure (P-S) rule approach advocated by proponents of the Aux analysis which relies on P-S rules containing only one modal per surface clause (e.g., Chomsky 1957; Akmajian, Steele and Wasow 1979); and the subcategorization approach, proposed by advocates of the Main Verb analysis, which assumes that modals are finite forms and are subcategorized for stem forms (e.g., Baker 1981; Gazdar, Pullum and Sag 1982).

I'm about to revert to the Drmies version. -- Hoary (talk) 11:32, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

• Wow, I wrote that? Thanks Hoary. Drmies (talk) 13:41, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

"didn't use(d) to"

Here you'll find a bulky and lovingly crafted footnote that, I'm pretty sure, is about the not-so-obviously-major question of whether or not one should type a d in "I didn't used to watch Youtube". (I'm not entirely confident: I neither created it nor have edited it, and am not sure how its ellipses are intended to be understood.)

That's a question about lexical use(d), not about auxiliary (and perhaps modal auxiliary) use(d) (using which, one would say "I used not to watch Youtube" or "I usedn't to watch Youtube"). But this article is about modal auxiliary verbs, not their lexical homonyms, and therefore I removed this footnote in the following edit. Maybe it belongs in some other article.

(In conversational English, I suspect that "I never used to watch Youtube" would be more likely than anything above, but I can't immediately produce evidence supporting this belief.) -- Hoary (talk) 05:00, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

Use(d (to)): modal or not?

Use /jus/ is these days a lexical verb, more often than not. But it used not only to be. It used to be an auxiliary verb too, usedn't it? (Yes, it used to.) And for some speakers, it still is.

Now, the question is of whether to treat it as a modal auxiliary verb, or as just a (non-modal) auxiliary verb. Two authorities that treat it as a modal:

• Quirk, Randolph; Greenbaum, Sidney; Leech, Geoffrey; Svartvik, Jan (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. ISBN 0-582-51734-6.

• Warner, Anthony R. (1993). English Auxiliaries: Structure and History. Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-30284-5.

Three that do not:

• Aarts, Bas (2011). Oxford Modern English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-953319-0.

• Huddleston, Rodney; Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-43146-0.

• Palmer, F. R. (1988). The English Verb (2nd ed.). London: Longman. ISBN 0-582-01470-0.

Wikipedia shouldn't pretend that there's agreement. But it also shouldn't treat use as a modal in this article and as a non-modal in the article English auxiliary verbs -- which is what it does now.

Plan: A week from now, if nobody objects, I'll:

• remove most of the material in this article about use;
• in this article, acknowledge that a "modal auxiliary verb" status of use has its supporters;
• in this article, point to the discussion of use in the other article;
• paste into the other article the material about use from this article (acknowledging its source);
• edit the material in that article about use (cutting duplication, etc);
• make sure that in that article is an acknowledgement that a "modal auxiliary verb" status of use has its supporters.

How about it? -- Hoary (talk) 12:15, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

Quirk et al. admit that it is not semantically modal, "in formal terms, however, it fits the marginal modal category." If modality is a semantic concept, then this appears simply to be sloppy terminology. I think your plan is sound.--Brett (talk) 14:40, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

Brett, I wrote the lengthy question cum tentative announcement above while 80% asleep, and wake to find that it's about as prolix and incoherent as would be expected. Well done on your success in making sense of it. Yes, after considering the syntax of use, Huddleston similarly adds "It is also semantically quite distinct from the modal auxiliaries: the meaning it expresses is aspectual, not modal." But if we were using semantic criteria, we'd have considerable trouble (at best) with need and would have to reject dare. -- Hoary (talk) 21:46, 17 December 2023 (UTC)