Date:  Tue, 17 Oct 1995 08:52:17 -0700

From:  Dan Moonhawk Alford <dalford[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]S1.CSUHAYWARD.EDU>

Subject: Re: Double/Multiple Modals



A great discussion! Kudos to all. I remember talking to James Sledd in

the summer of 1971, where he taught summers at Montana State University,

Bozeman. I was fresh out of Chomskyan UCLA training, and couldn't figure

out this old coot, a dyed-in-the-wool structuralist who would have

nothing to do with this new-fangled transformational stuff. And guess

what?! He pointed to the existence of double modals as an Achilles heel

for TG -- which I guess today would extend to GB and others as well.

Little did I know then that I was a year away from flushing it all down

the toilet in the face of an American Indian language, Cheyenne, in which

a word can be a sentence -- LONG on morphology and short on syntax.

Whatever happened to morphosyntax anyway?





On Tue, 17 Oct 1995, Bethany Dumas, UTK wrote:



> The constructions like "might could" are called double modals or multiple

> modals. There are several good article or parts of articles, all of which are

> cited in my not quite published article. There can also be three of them

> if one allows in quasi-modals. Ex: might should oughta.

>

> The best comment I have ever heard about them cam from Bill Labov in

> an Institute talk one year. He discussed the form (and every grammar book I

> have ever examined says categorially, "modals cannnot be combined in

> English"), then exaplained their distribution in SOuthern English and

> concluded, "Standard English may be considerd a subset of Southern

> English. Southern English allows a wider range of variations then

> Standard English."

>

> I am trying to get bothe my double modal paper and my a-prefixing paper

> finished and to journals RIGHT NOW.

>

> Bethany

> dumasb[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]utk.edu

>