The expression of modality in Korean - Institut für ...

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The resulting problems concerning any work on modality are summed up in similar vein by
Perkins (1983):
„Doing research on modality is very similar to trying to move in an overcrowded
room without treading on anyone else’s feet.“ (Perkins 1983, 4)
This intricate „maze“, to take up Jongeboer’s phrasing, of definitorial problems and
difficulties is due to a number of circumstances. One of these is the fact that modality is the
subject of more than one scientific discipline, namely logic and linguistics. Seemingly one of
the first people known to have written about what we now refer to as modality was Aristotle;
his thoughts on notions such as necessity and possibility versus impossibility came to be the
basis on which modal logic stands. Modality, therefore, is a prime object of logic analysis and
as such has a long tradition. However, as the science of logic is commonly associated with
stating what one might term the „laws of thought“ and the expression of thoughts is obviously
the core task of language, it is neither difficult to see nor understand why linguistics should
also have come to find itself confronted with the phenomenon of modality. While one may
well argue (such as Pedersen (1989)) that modality is central to both the study of logic and the
study of language, it seems obvious in my view that, in most cases and despite some
parallelisms (e.g. terminological and, to a certain extent, conceptual) the actual objects as
much as the interests and goals of a linguistic analysis of modality are fundamentally different
from a logic analysis of modality. What modal logic does in this respect, if we take up
Herslund’s (1989) résumé, is to
„isolate certain parts of sentences and restate them in a formalised way thereby
making it possible to calculate, and state precisely, the meaning relations between
sentences. (...) modal logic does not necessarily mirror natural language, but (...)
important analogies exist.“ (Herslund 1989, 11)
This then is a quantification of modality, accomplished by the use of „formal machinery
which is the trademark of twentieth century modal logic“ (Perkins 1983, 6). There are
linguistic approaches to analyzing modality which are, either explicitly or implicitly,
congenial to approaches of modal logic, such as e.g. Kratzer (1991) 2 . There is, however, a
great deal more to the linguistic study of modality than only a logical dimension, and in this
study, the emphasis will be decidedly on what one might call the notional dimension of
modality. This view of modality does not primarily classify concepts such as possibility and
2 Kratzer’s approach is congenial to modal logic in that her theory of modality is based on the main assumption
that modality should be viewed as restricted quantification over so-called possible worlds (denoting in effect
possible states of affairs or situations), and quantification (of modality) is also at the centre of modal logic.