What’s in a Rule? A Cross-Slavic Survey of Anankastic Modals

What is it about?

In this chapter, a more fine-grained distinction within the domain of Slavic universal necessity modals is advocated for between ‘true’ deontics and anankastics, i.e., operators expressing ‘non-epistemic,’ participant-external, ‘non-deontic’ necessity (van der Auwera and Plungian 1998). Although anankastic modals have been extensively treated in formal semantics approaches, which have mainly dealt with a set of conditional constructions apparently impervious to a compositional derivation, they have rarely been studied from a comparative perspective. On the basis of a mixed sample of corpus and questionnaire data from Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and Czech, a number of formal diagnostics designed to capture the distributional properties of anankastic modals are put to the test and aligned with the structural characteristics of Slavic modal systems.

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Photo by Kaysha on Unsplash

Photo by Kaysha on Unsplash