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Huddleston 1979. Would Have Become Empty or Modal Will
Huddleston 1979. Would Have Become Empty or Modal Will
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to Journal of Linguistics
University of Queensland
as the unreal mood form of an epistemic modal verb WILL that figures in the
underlying syntactic representation and falls within the semantic scope of a past
element realized by HAVE. Palmer (1978) criticizes this analysis, claiming that
WILL iS 'obviously' semantically empty, a mere 'dummy' inserted to carry the
mark of unreality - that would have become is 'the Unreal and Past form of
BECOME'. In this reply I seek to establish that the WILL of (I) is not empty by
demonstrating its semantic continuity with uncontroversially meaningful uses of
WILL, and to answer the specific objections that Palmer makes to my own analysis.
Consider first real conditions, such as
This, like the simple sentence He will become a colonel, contains what Palmer
regards as a 'futurity' use of WILL, with a 'very different meaning' from that of a
'true epistemic' WILL in, say, They'll be on holiday now. It seems to me, however,
that Palmer's sharp distinction between futurity and epistemic WILL is based on
an incorrect semantic analysis of the latter. He interprets it as expressing prob-
ability, placing it on an epistemic scale in between the MAY of possibility and the
MUST of certainty. Futurity WILL involves for him no epistemic qualification at
all, so that It will rain soon is epistemically stronger than It must surely rain soon,
whereas They will be on holiday now, expressing probability, is epistemically
weaker than They must be on holiday now, which expresses certainty - hence
two distinct meanings of WILL. I would dispute, however, that WILL with a non-
future complement expresses mere probability. They will be on holiday now does
not have at all the same meaning as It is probable that they are on holiday now:
I could continue the latter with but it's just possible that they don't start till next
week, whereas adding this to They'll be on holiday now would be semantically
inconsistent. The idea that WILL expresses probability doubtless arises from the
fact that it is often used in situations when our evidence for the factuality of the
complement does not provide strict 'epistemic warrant' (to use Lyons' felicitous
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now, and it is this aspect of its meaning that makes it so appropriate for use in
unreal conditions.
The unreal counterpart of (2) is
The temporal relations are here exactly the same as in (2). Since non-past (3), as
well as past (i), unreal conditions require that the finite verb of the apodosis be
drawn from the set CAN, DARE, MAY, MUST, NEED, OUGHT (for some speakers only),
SHALL (with Ist Person subject), WILL, Palmer would presumably handle the
WILL of (3) as empty too. But I do not see how this analysis can be sustained in
the light of the above discussion of the meaning of WILL. It denies that the WILL
of (3) is the same as that of (2), which no one would claim to be empty; it treats
would become as the unreal counterpart of becomes rather than will become. That
this is semantically unsatisfactory is evident from such a set of examples as
(4) If you behave like that tomorrow, you (i) I } your pocket money.
L (ii) losef
f (i) would lose] your pocket
(5) If you behaved like that tomorrow, you l(ii) *lost money.
The difference between (4i) and (4ii) is like that between the non-conditional
examples discussed above. The absence of predictive modality in (4ii) makes the
threat that it would typically be used to make somewhat more forceful than is the
case with (4i): the occurrence of the event under the stated condition is guaranteed
in the here-and-now. (5i) clearly corresponds to (4i) rather than (4ii), and this is
the correspondence that is captured by an analysis where it contains the WILL of
(4i). The constraint which excludes (5ii) is not semantically necessary, but nor is
it arbitrary. The unreal mood and predictive epistemic modality in (5i) reinforce
each other in removing the contingent loss of pocket money from the immediacy
of the real world here-and-now, and there is no necessary reason why the
grammar should not allow the mood to do this without the reinforcement of the
modality. But this is very different from saying that there simply is no semantic
modality in (5i). Why should the meaning of modal WILL exclude its use in
unreal conditionals?
(i) differs from (3) in having a past in both protasis and apodosis. But I see no
reason for distinguishing their WILL'S: neither is empty - the difference is simply
that in (I) WILL falls within the scope of the past.
Let me turn now to the arguments Palmer advances against my own analysis.
First, it allegedly suggests that 'epistemicity is an essential element of an Unreal
apodosis'. In a sentence like [If I had had time] I could have got the money easily
enough, CAN iS used in its 'root' rather than epistemic sense. 'To be at all con-
sistent', therefore, I would have to have a WILL in the underlying structure of this
sentence as a marker of the epistemicity. Such an analysis is so implausible,
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(6) If he had lived he would have taken over the leadership when Tom retires
next year.
[i] I should add that Palmer treats volitional WILL as modal, so that the WILL of I would
have come if you had asked me (1977: I9) is not empty. Again this seems to impose an
unjustifiably sharp distinction on the language system. Is If 3'ohn had been called as a
witness he would probably have misled the jury an ambiguous SENTENCE, with WILL empty
in one interpretation, meaningful in another?
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If have taken were past relative to a deictic present associated with WILL it wo
be incompatible with the future time specifier expressed in the when-clause.
Palmer acknowledges that his analysis raises the problem of 'how a Past Unreal
form may refer to the future'. He suggests that the have is redundant in such
cases: 'would [alone] is equally appropriate and not semantically different [from
would have]' (79). He seems to be saying that when there is 'reference to the
future [relative to the time of the speech act]' in would have V-en, the HAVE too is
semantically empty, introduced by a redundancy rule - that in such cases would
have become is underlyingly a non-past unreal. This distinction between two
interpretations or semantic analysis of would have V-en seems to me quite
unworkable. It is misleading to talk about the verbal form itself referring to a
deictic future: it is the when-clause in (6) that establishes that the time of taking
over the leadership is future relative to the time of speaking. Palmer says that he
cannot see any difference between he would have been a colonel now and he would
be a colonel now as apodoses to if he had stayed in the army. But if we replace now
by soon the difference becomes quite clear:
(7) If he had stayed in the army, he would soon (i) have been a colonel.
(ii) be J
In (7ii), soon is necessarily deictic: 'in a short while from now'. In (7i), howeve
it can be interpreted non-deictically as 'in a short while from then'. Depending
on how recent 'then' was, 'in a short while from then' could extend to cover 'in a
short while from now', so that (7i), with non-deictic soon, does not exclude the
case where being a colonel is future relative to the time of speaking. But it is not
ambiguous according to whether being a colonel is future or not, just as If he had
lived he would have taken over the leadership is not ambiguous according as the
taking over is before or after 'now': it simply does not relate the time of the taking
over to the time of the speech act. The situation is like that we find in indirect
discourse. In Mary said he will take over the leadership we have a non-past
(interpreted as future) relative to the deictic present of will: the speaker relates
the event to the time of his own speech act, not Mary's. But in Alary said he
would take over the leadership, the event is non-past/future relative to the past of
would: Mary's speech act provides the reference point, and the sentence is
again not ambiguous according as the event is past or future relative to 'now'.
Again, Lyons' recent discussion of tense and modality (1977: 809-823)
provides a framework within which these facts can be handled. He assigns
temporal indices to the three components of the utterance that he distinguishes,
phrastic, (tj), tropic (ti) and neustic (t0), where to is the time of the speech act.
In the direct discourse interpretation of It was raining, to = ti>tj, i.e. 'It is a
fact that it was raining'. In the ('backshifted') indirect discourse interpretation,
to> ti = tj, i.e. 'It was a fact that it is raining'. The tense associated with B
in the first interpretation is deictic in that it relates the time to ti = to, but in the
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REFERENCES
[2] The same question arises with non-past real conditions like If youi enter the competition
you can win it: is this to = t; < tj = tk or to = t, = tj < tk? The question thus concerns
the interpretation of CAN in conditionals in general: the past unreal components do not
bring in any special factors.
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