Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

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(genauer: perfektiv-medialen) Funktion ableitbar ist, und zwar als deren modale Deutung. Das
ist durchaus vergleichbar mit der temporalen Umdeutung der Aspektfunktion. Die
epistemische Funktion der Modalverben entsteht wiederum unmittelbar aus deren deontischer
Modalität, als deren „deiktische“ Lesart (Diewald 1999), wobei dieser Prozess sensu stricto
keiner Rekonstruktion bedarf, da er erst in der Epoche der Schriftlichkeit einsetzt und daher
sehr gut nachvollzogen werden kann.
Literatur (in Auswahl)
Diewald, Gabriele 1999. Die Modalverben im Deutschen. Grammatikalisierung und
Polyfunktionalität. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Kuryłowicz, Jerzy 1964. The inflectional categories of Indo-European. Heidelberg: Winter.
Stang, Christian 1932. Perfectum und Medium. Norsk tidskrift for sprokvidenska 6: 29-39.
Aspect, (in)definiteness, and modality:
The invisible patterns of deonticity and epistemicity
Leiss, Elisabeth
LMU Munich
e.leiss@germanistik.uni-muenchen.de
The central thesis guiding our research in this domain says that aspect languages use aspectual
form to encode deontic and epistemic meanings. On the other hand, languages which have
lost aspect, develop articles and a class of modals with deontic and epistemic meanings. The
starting point is the seminal paper presented at Tokyo by Abraham 1991, which claims that:
1. modals combine with perfective infinitives in order to generate deontic meaning;
2. modals combine with imperfective infinitives in order to generate epistemic meaning.
Van Gelderen (2004:155) follows this line of argument in syntactic terms: “Since I argue that
(deontic) modals merge as ASP, this raises the question as to what modals have in common
with aspect“.
What kind of shared grammatical meaning attracts perfectivity to deonticity? The common
denominator to be found has to deal with some more striking data: A strong affinitiy between
non-finiteness and deontic meaning in contrast to an apparent affinity between finiteness and
epistemic meaning (Abraham 2001, 2002; Hyams2005).
In the present paper, historical evidence supporting these correlations will be presented. In
Old and Middle High German perfective verbs are used more frequently in non-finite form
(Behaghel 1923/1989:103-104). This focus on the affinity of perfectivity and non-finiteness is
very revealing as to the direction where to find the hidden patterns of deonticity and
epistemicity such as suggested in Leiss (2002).
References:
Abraham, Werner (1991): Modalverben in der Germania. In: Iwasaki, E.: (ed.): Begegnung
mit dem “Fremden”. Grenzen – Traditionen – Vergleiche. Akten des VIII.
Internationalen Germanisten-Kongresses in Tokyo 1990. München 1991, vol. 4, 109-118.
Abraham, Werner (2001): Modals: toward explaining the ‘epistemic non-finiteness gap’. In:
Müller/Reis 2001, 7-36.
Behaghel, Otto (1923/1989): Deutsche Syntax. Eine geschichtliche Darstellung. Vol. 2, 2nd
unrevised editon 1989. Heidelberg: Winter 1923
Gelderen, Elly van (2004): Grammaticalization as Economy. Amsterdam, Philadelphia:
Benjamins 2004. [Linguistik Aktuell / Linguistics Today 71].