Epistemic modality is a sub-type of

linguistic modality In linguistics and philosophy, modality refers to the ways language can express various relationships to reality or truth. For instance, a modal expression may convey that something is likely, desirable, or permissible. Quintessential modal ex ...

that encompasses

knowledge Knowledge can be defined as awareness of facts or as practical skills, and may also refer to familiarity with objects or situations. Knowledge of facts, also called propositional knowledge, is often defined as true belief that is distinc ...

belief A belief is an attitude that something is the case, or that some proposition is true. In epistemology, philosophers use the term "belief" to refer to attitudes about the world which can be either true or false. To believe something is to take i ...

, or credence in a proposition. Epistemic modality is exemplified by the English modals ''may'', ''might'', ''must''. However, it occurs cross-linguistically, encoded in a wide variety of lexical items and grammatical structures. Epistemic modality has been studied from many perspectives within linguistics and philosophy. It is one of the most studied phenomena in formal semantics.

Realisation in speech

* (a) ''grammatically'': through **

modal verb A modal verb is a type of verb that contextually indicates a modality such as a ''likelihood'', ''ability'', ''permission'', ''request'', ''capacity'', ''suggestion'', ''order'', ''obligation'', or ''advice''. Modal verbs generally accompany the b ...

s (e.g., English: ''may'', ''might'', ''must''; german: sollen: ''Er soll ein guter Schachspieler sein'' "He is said to be a good chess player"), ** particular

grammatical mood In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying (for example, a statement of ...

s on

verb A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...

s, the epistemic moods, or ** a specific grammatical element, such as an

affix In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ar ...

(

Tuyuca Tuyuca (also Dochkafuara, Tejuca, Tuyuka, Dojkapuara, Doxká-Poárá, Doka-Poara, or Tuiuca) is an Eastern Tucanoan language (similar to Tucano). Tuyuca is spoken by the Tuyuca, an indigenous ethnic group of some 500-1000 people, who inhabit the ...

: ''-hīyi'' "reasonable to assume") or

particle In the Outline of physical science, physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscule in older texts) is a small wikt:local, localized physical body, object which can be described by several physical property, physical or chemical property, chemical ...

; or * (b) ''non-grammatically'' (often lexically): through **

adverbial In English grammar, an adverbial (abbreviated ) is a word (an adverb) or a group of words (an adverbial clause or adverbial phrase) that modifies or more closely defines the sentence or the verb. (The word ''adverbial'' itself is also used as a ...

s (e.g.,

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

: ''perhaps'', ''possibly''), or ** through a certain intonational pattern

Non-canonical environments and objective epistemic modality

Lyons 1977 started a long discussion regarding in which environments epistemic modal operators can be embedded and from which environments they are banned. He argues that epistemic modal operators compete for the same position as

illocution The concept of illocutionary acts was introduced into linguistics by the philosopher J. L. Austin in his investigation of the various aspects of speech acts. In his framework, ''locution'' is what was said and meant, ''illocution'' is what was done, ...

ary operators, such as the assertion operator, question operator or imperative operator. According to him this explains why most epistemic modals in English are not acceptable embedded under questions or negation. As Lyons finds single lexemes of epistemic modals in English that are used in questions and under negation, he assumes that they must be part of a separate class of epistemic modality–the so called ''objective'' epistemic modality, in contrast to ''subjective'' epistemic modality—whose operators are considered to be taking the same position in the clause as illocutionary operators. Which modal lexemes convey an `objective' epistemic interpretation is subject to much controversy. So far most of the authors who are in favour of a distinct class of objective epistemic modal verbs have not explicitly stated which verbs can be interpreted in an `objective' epistemic way and which can only be interpreted in an `subjective' epistemic way. It is often assumed that, for languages such as English, Hungarian, Dutch and German, epistemic adverbs only involve a subjective epistemic interpretation and can never be interpreted in an objective epistemic way. Since the publication of Lyons' work, a range environments have been suggested from which (subjective) epistemic modals are assumed to be banned. Most of these non-canonical environments were motivated by data from English: *No infinitives *No past participles *No past tenses *Excluded from the

scope Scope or scopes may refer to: People with the surname * Jamie Scope (born 1986), English footballer * John T. Scopes (1900–1970), central figure in the Scopes Trial regarding the teaching of evolution Arts, media, and entertainment * Cinem ...

of a

counterfactual Counterfactual conditionals (also ''subjunctive'' or ''X-marked'') are conditional sentences which discuss what would have been true under different circumstances, e.g. "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here." Counterfactual ...

operator *Excluded from nominalisations *No verbless directional phrase complements *No VP-anaphora *No separation in wh-clefts *May not bear sentence accent *Excluded from the scope of an

negation In logic, negation, also called the logical complement, is an operation that takes a proposition P to another proposition "not P", written \neg P, \mathord P or \overline. It is interpreted intuitively as being true when P is false, and false ...

*Excluded from

polar questions Polar may refer to: Geography Polar may refer to: * Geographical pole, either of two fixed points on the surface of a rotating body or planet, at 90 degrees from the equator, based on the axis around which a body rotates * Polar climate, the c ...

*Excluded from wh-questions *Excluded from imperatives *Excluded from optatives *Excluded from complement clauses *Excluded from event-related causal clauses *Excluded from the antecedent of an event related

conditional clause Conditional sentences are natural language sentences that express that one thing is contingent on something else, e.g. "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the main clause of the sentence is ''con ...

*Excluded from temporal clauses *Excluded from restrictive

relative clauses A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phraseRodney D. Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, ''A Student's Introduction to English Grammar'', CUP 2005, p. 183ff. and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments ...

*Excluded from the scope of a quantifier *No assent/dissent However, taking a look into languages which have a more productive inflectional morphology such as German, there is solid corpus data that epistemic modal verbs do occur in many of these environments. The only environments in which epistemic modal verbs do not occur in German are as follows. * they do not occur with verbless directional phrase complements * they cannot be separated from their infinitive complements in wh-clefts * they do not undergo nominalisations * they are exempt from adverbial infinitives * they cannot be embedded under circumstantial modal verbs * they cannot be embedded under predicates of desire * they cannot be embedded under imperative operators * they cannot be embedded under optative operators This corpus data further shows that there is no consistent class of objective epistemic modal verbs, neither in English, nor in German. Each of the assumed objective epistemic modals is acceptable in a different range of environments which are actually supposed to hold for the entire stipulated class of objective epistemic modality. The table below illustrates in which environments the most frequent epistemic modals in German, ''kann'' `can', ''muss'' `must', ''dürfte'' `be.probable', ''mögen'' `may' are attested in corpora (yes), or yield ungrammatical judgements (no). The lower part makes reference to classifications by various authors, which of these epistemic modal verb come with an objective epistemic interpretation and which are only restricted to subjective epistemic modality.

Link to evidentiality

Many linguists have considered possible links between epistemic modality and

evidentiality In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and if so, what kind. An evidential (also verificational or validational) is the particul ...

, the grammatical marking of a speaker's evidence or information source. However, there is no consensus about what such a link consists of. Some work takes epistemic modality as a starting point and tries to explain evidentiality as a subtype. Others work in the other direction, attempting to reduce epistemic modality to evidentiality. Still others recognize epistemic modality and evidentiality as two fundamentally separate categories, and posit that particular lexical items may have both an epistemic and an evidential component to their meanings. However, other linguists feel that evidentiality is distinct from and not necessarily related to modality. Some languages mark evidentiality separately from epistemic modality.De Haan, pp. 56–59, and references therein.

Notes

References

* Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (2004). ''Evidentiality''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . * Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.; & Dixon, R. M. W. (Eds.). (2003). ''Studies in evidentiality''. Typological studies in language (Vol. 54). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. ; . * Blakemore, D. (1994). Evidence and modality. In R. E. Asher (Ed.), ''The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics'' (pp. 1183–1186). Oxford: Pergamon Press. . * De Haan, F. (2006). Typological approaches to modality. In W. Frawley (Ed.), ''The Expression of Modality'' (pp. 27–69). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. * Diewald, Gabriele. 1999. Die Modalverben im Deutschen: Grammatikalisierung und Polyfunktionalität. Reihe Germanistische Linguistik, No. 208, Tübingen: Niemeyer. * Hacquard, Valentine and Wellwood, Alexis: Embedding epistemic modals in English. A corpus-based study. In Semantics & Pragmatics 5(4), pp. 1–29 http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.4 * Kiefer, Ferenc. 1984. Focus and modality. Groninger Abreiten zur Germanistischen Linguistik 24, 55–81. * Kiefer, Ferenc. (1986). Epistemic possibility and focus. In W. Abraham & S. de Meij (Eds.), ''Topic, focus, and configurationality''. Amsterdam: Benjamins. * Kiefer, Ferenc. (1994). Modality. In R. E. Asher (Ed.), ''The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics'' (pp. 2515–2520). Oxford: Pergamon Press. . * Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics, volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press * Maché, Jakob 2013
On Black Magic -- How epistemic modifiers emerge. Phd-Thesis. Freie Universität Berlin.
* Nuyts, J. (2001). ''Epistemic modality, language, and conceptualization: A cognitive-pragmatic perspective.'' Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. *Nuyts, Jan. 2001b. Subjectivity as an evidential dimension in epistemic modal expression. Journal of Pragmatics 33(3), 383–400. * Öhlschläger, Günther. 1989. Zur Syntax und Semantik der Modalverben, volume 144 of Linguistische Arbeiten. Tübingen: Niemeyer. * Palmer, F. R. (1979). ''Modality and the English modals''. London: Longman. * Palmer, F. R. (1986). ''Mood and modality''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , . * Palmer, F. R. (2001). ''Mood and modality'' (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , . * Palmer, F. R. (1994). Mood and modality. In R. E. Asher (Ed.), ''The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics'' (pp. 2535–2540). Oxford: Pergamon Press. * Saeed, John I. (2003). Sentence semantics 1: Situations: Modality and evidentiality. In J. I Saeed, ''Semantics'' (2nd. ed) (Sec. 5.3, pp. 135–143). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. , . * Tancredi, Christopher. 2007. A Multi-Model Modal Theory of I-Semantics. Part I: Modals. Ms. University of Tokyo. * Watts, Richard J. 1984. An analysis of epistemic possibility and probability. English Studies 65(2), 129–140.

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