Competing modals

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a corpus-based diachronic investigation into the semantic evolution of the Dutch modalskunnen“can”,mogen“may” andmoeten“must”, revealing an interaction between processes of (inter)subjectification and of semantic competition (‘no synonymy’).Mogenandkunnendo, butmoetendoes not, show an evolution in terms of (inter)subjectification. But developments inmogenandkunnenalso show an effect of the fact that historically they have been competing for the same semantic ground. There is no comparable competition for semantic ground inmoeten. This strongly suggests an interaction between the ‘no synonymy’ principle and (inter)subjectification, whereby the former may actually trigger the latter.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 78 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.