Abstract
This paper is about a particular use of the German modal sollte (‘should’) in the antecendent of conditionals as illustrated in (1)–(3). We call this use the “deliberative” use of sollte. We argue that on its deliberative use sollte doesn’t behave as the weak necessity modal it is standardly assumed to be. The distributional facts suggest that the use conditions of sollte-antecendents are closely related to the use conditions of conditional antecendents with the complementizer falls (‘in case’). Following a recent proposal by Hinterwimmer for falls, we propose that sollte in the antecendent of a conditional introduces a use condition that takes the truth of the antecendent proposition to be a truly open possibility against a given conversational background.
We would like to thank the audiences at the Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop at Mie University, the Semantics Research Group Meeting at Keio University, the Oberseminar English Linguistics at Göttingen University and, in particular, Elin McCready, Shinya Okano, Jan Köpping, Osamu Sawada, Joe Tabolt, Hubert Truckenbrodt, Thomas Weskott and Ede Zimmermann for helpful discussions and comments. This work has been funded by the 2018 JSPS Summer Program.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
We assume that everything we say in this paper holds in the same way for wenn...sollte- antecedents, as in (1) and (2), as for sollte-V1-antecedents, as in (3). Wherever we choose to illustrate a point with a wenn...sollte- antecedent, we might aswell have chosen a sollte-V1-antecedent and the other way around. We will refer to both types of antecedents as “sollte-antecedents”.
- 2.
[4] report that “English should shows the same reading.” As for example:
-
(i)
If this should be proven to be correct, it would have major implications for particle physics. http://news.mit.edu/2010/neutrinos-0812
As in German, one also finds conditional antecendents with should in first position. More data from English can be found in Daan Van den Nest’s dissertation:
-
(ii)
Should they use what is regarded as excessive or unnecessary force, they, too, might well become the targets of aggression. Daan Van den Nest (2010)
-
(i)
- 3.
We use the term “deontic modal” here in a rather wide way corresponding to what [6] calls a “priority modal”.
- 4.
As in the example in (6), the comparative adverbials besser (‘better’) and lieber (‘preferably’) can in principle always accompany a deontic use of sollte. It cannot accompany the relevant deliberative use.
-
(i)
Wenn das dir (*lieber/*besser) zu früh sein sollte, dann komm einfach später. If this should (*preferably/*better) be to early for you, then just come later.
-
(i)
- 5.
We don’t want to say that modals that in principle do have epistemic interpretations never occur in the antecendent of conditionals, see [5] for a discussion. But these uses seem to be rare. The rareness of real epistemic readings of modals in the antecendent of conditionals is confirmed by a comprehensive corpus search in the DWDS subcorpus “DWDS-Kernkorpus (1900–1999)” (https://www.dwds.de/; date of search: October 06, 2018).
- 6.
The assumed paraphrase is of course a simplification. For concrete proposals of the meaning of English should as a weak epistemic necessity modal/normality modal: see [1] and [8]. The same point could be made if we were to assume a similar contribution for the German modal sollte on its epistemic use as [1] and [8] assume for should.
- 7.
In a later paragraph, we will argue that certain occurences of sollte in relative clauses are also deliberative uses of sollte. With these examples, it can be clearly seen that the deliberative use of sollte is not an epistemic use since we also find clear cases of epistemic uses in (appositive) relative clauses.
In contrast to (i), the reltative clause in (ii) clearly has an epistemic interpretation.
- 8.
For a detailed discussion of the use conditions of conditional antecedents with the complementizer falls see [2].
- 9.
Here is the only difference we found to the use conditions of falls-antecendents: Since falls-antecendents can in principle be marked with additional subjunctive mood, we find a difference in certain counterfactual contexts. Against the same background as (29), the falls-antecendent is fine:
This example shows that Hinterwimmer’s generalization that falls-antecedents cannot be used in counterfactual contexts for the antecendent proposition has to be modified. At the same time, it seems to be the right generalization for sollte-antecendents.
- 10.
[2]: “falls seems to require that the speaker considers the antecedent proposition to be a truly open possibility.”
- 11.
This is very close in spirit to the proposal in [2] for falls.
- 12.
Hinterwimmer also assumes a stereotypical ordering source in the context of his proposal for falls.
- 13.
We use a syncategorematic meaning rule in (30-b) since this is the direct way to spell out our proposal. Here is the non-syncategorematic rule:
This semantic rule gives us an interesting additional insight since it forces us to distinguish between the local world of evaluation and the local context world (for which we write “\(c_{\textsc {w}}\)”). This might have to be reconsidered in the light of the considerations at the end of this paper.
- 14.
Deliberative sollte could be characterized as an anti-root-phenomenon. This is the reason why we introduced the condition that the local world of evaluation must be different from the world of the local root context in our definition, compare condition (i–c) of footnote 13 .
References
Copley, B.: What should should mean. Manuscript. CNRS (2006)
Hinterwimmer, S.: A comparison of the conditional complementizers if and falls, Wuppertaler Linguistisches Forum (WLF), Universität Wuppertal (2014)
Kratzer, A.: The notional category of modality. In: Eikmeyer, H.J., Rieser, H. (eds.) Words, Worlds, and Contexts, pp. 38–74. de Gruyter, Berlin (1981)
Matthewson, L., Truckenbrodt, H.: Modal flavour/modal force interactions in German: soll, sollte, muss and müsste. Linguist. Ber. 255, 4–57 (2018)
Papafragou, A.: Epistemic modality and truth conditions. Lingua 116, 1688–1702 (2006)
Portner, P.: Modality. Oxford Surveys in Semantics and Pragmatics. Oxford University Press, New York (2009)
Schenner, M.: Double face evidentials in German: Reportative ‘sollen’ and ‘wollen’ in embedded contexts. In: Groenn, A. (ed.) Proceedings of SuB12, pp. 552–566. ILOS, Oslo (2008)
Yalcin, S.: Modalities of normality. In: Charlow, N., Chrisman, M. (eds.) Deontic Modality, pp. 230–255. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2016)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sode, F., Sugawara, A. (2019). On the Deliberative Use of the German Modal sollte. In: Kojima, K., Sakamoto, M., Mineshima, K., Satoh, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11717. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31605-1_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31605-1_25
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-31604-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-31605-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)