Multiplying Modals

February 1, 2012, 12:01 am

My favorite part of speech is the group of little guys known as modal auxiliaries or informally, modals. There are nine of them:

can, could

may, might

will, would

shall, should

must

(There are some other quasi-modals like had to, used to, and ought to, but those nine are the hard core.)

Modals are a kind of verb, but that’s like saying a rose is a kind of flower. Modals are special.

What makes them special is:

—They are short.

—They are always auxiliaries, always helping other verbs.

—They are always first in line in the verb phrase, e.g.: “You might have been being misunderstood.”

—They are unchanging in tense and aspect: no past tense or past participle ending with ed, no present participle ending with ing.

—They are unchanging also with regard to singular and plural subjects. Where other verbs add s for third-person-singular present tense, modals do not.

This makes modals a writer’s pals in cases where it’s hard to decide whether a subject is singular or not. Should you say “None of these answers satisfies her” or “None of these answers satisfy her”? Add a modal helper and you won’t have to look up the answer in a grammar book: “None of these answers will satisfy her.”

—And finally, modals are also writers’ pals because they are moody. That’s what “modal” means, expressing a mood. Take a plain declarative sentence like “This is dangerous” and add your choice of a modal to capture the nuance you want: can be dangerous, could be dangerous, may be dangerous, might be dangerous. …

There is a limit to moodiness, though. From the grammar books we learn that just one modal is allowed per main verb. Wouldn’t it be great if we could express a complex mood with two or three of them?

Well, wonder of wonders, that might could come to pass. For it happens that in the Southern states of the United States, and also in parts of Scotland, England, Ireland, and the Caribbean, people do use multiple modals.

And this very day, February 1, 2012, a Web site is scheduled to go public that demonstrates and celebrates this fact. It’s MultiMo: The Database of Multiple Modals: A New Resource for Researchers. Bookmark this address: http://casdemo.cas.sc.edu/modals_d/.

Developed at the University of South Carolina by Michael Montgomery, an expert on Southern and Appalachian English, with Paul Reed, this database includes more than 1,500 double or even triple modals collected from actual use. Here’s a sample:

“You may shouldn’t eat that many peanuts, cause folks have told me they’re not actual good for you.” For every entry there is information about the context. In this case, it was spoken by a 60-year-old white woman, a mother to her son, in North or South Carolina.

“I think probably the only thing we may would have would be napkins,” says a woman in South Carolina.

“Could we might plan a study session?” asks a young woman in her 20s.

“I might could feel worse but I’m damned if I know how,” says a middle-aged man to a woman.

There are literary examples too, including one from Flannery O’Connor’s Everything that Rises Must Converge: “‘I reckon it might could,’ the woman with the protruding teeth said, ‘but I know for a fact my apartment couldn’t get no hotter.’”

Among the many double modals in the database, there are also a very few triple modals, including this one:

“It’s a long way and he might will can’t come, but I’m gonna ask,” says a 50-year-old white woman, an aunt to her niece, in North or South Carolina.

Although it is entertaining, the Web site is designed for serious research. It includes an overview essay, a bibliography, and selected commentary on multiple modals. It also invites you to contribute further examples. You might can should take a look!

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bizdean

It’s a different usage. I cannot believe the mood of a verb has any relation to the mood of a human. I mean, I used to could, but now I can’t.
(The latter is a real and common Texas usage.)

dank48

And Oklahoman as well. My friend from Lawton, Charles Brooks, once remarked, “I’ve got to the point where I can’t do some things I used to could.”

Guest

I like it. I could say that without the least frisson of grammatical dissonance.

philosophy

I’m surprized that the modal list doesn’t include (well, it does by implication) “possible” and “necessary,” the fundamental concepts of modal logical systems. “Could,” “might,” and “would” are ways of describing what is possible; “should” and “must,” what is necessary.

johnwiley

That should work–maybe.

http://nathaniel-campbell.blogspot.com/ Nathaniel M. Campbell

It seems to me that in some of these examples, at least, the second modal is being used in place of an adverb. Thus, “You may shouldn’t eat that many peanuts,” might be expressed by another speaker as, “You perhaps shouldn’t eat that many peanuts.” Likewise, “Could we might plan a study session?” might otherwise be said, “Could we maybe plan a study session?”

Indeed, isn’t “maybe” as an adverb precisely an evolution from such a multiple modal usage?

nordicexpat

Pullum made this suggestion years ago, but I imagine you know this.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005136.html

http://nathaniel-campbell.blogspot.com/ Nathaniel M. Campbell

I actually wasn’t aware of that entry; thank you for the link! It’s always gratifying to find my own thinking validated by people much smarter than I am.

sisgett

I might could have enjoyed this piece more, but I can’t imagine how!

dressman

Years ago in Chapel Hill, my wife worked at the UNC TV station and heard a technician say that he might could maybe be able to help. She declared that it was the ultimate in conceptualized presentation. . . or just hedging his bets.

leo_mar1477

Individuals making the transition from a first language to a second language can oftentimes run into problems with use of verbs.Just a thought.
leo_mar1477

Interesting graphic of the use of euphemisms
westwoodwiz

I’m amazed that career academics are now apoplectic to learn of the movement to starve the educational system. Seriously? You can’t understand why good, reasonable people would want to do this? It’s not as if the product, especially in the soft-sciences, is anything to brag about. I’m confident the country can do just fine without more ill-informed students conned into majoring in Ethnomusicography, Women’s Studies, Peace Studies, or Marxist Critical Theory.

The fact is many in the academy have abandoned dispassionate pursuit of knowledge in favor of a narrow political agenda. Now they’re surprised that Universities don’t wield the same level of public esteem. Take a look at the blog list that informs your thought (e.g., Affrodissent and Lesboprof). No thanks. I’ll send my money elsewhere.

This is actually a timely post when juxtaposed with the backdrop of the Obamacare vote. Many very bright and culturally hip academics are aghast to learn that someone might think there are very serious problems with new healthcare legislation. The chattering class has become prisoners of their own conceit. They don’t “get” other people, and they aren’t really interested in learning about the reasons why others, call them the unwashed, hold different values than they do.

Tenured_Radical

“apoplectic”? “aghast”? Methinks you need to take a Valium if that’s what leaps off the page at you. The issues you raise have nothing to do with what is at stake at Rutgers Camden. But do ride your hobby horse off into the sunset.

The capacity of conservative activists to imagine the vast majority of college professors as raving lunatics, simply because they disagree with conservative thought, would be a topic of study all in itself. Any takers?

By the way, the day someone doe send money to this blog will be a joy indeed. But if you are dying to spend money on a blogger go over to Althouse and buy a new copy of the Bell Curve through Amazon.

physioprof

Tenured Radical, in light of this woefully deficient blog post–most egregiously, your failure to arrive at the same undeniably correct conclusions that I have–I am very concerned about the welfare of your students. Do their parents know that their tuition dollars are paying for their intellectual and moral demise in your classroom?

Tenured_Radical

It’s horrible. Their brains run out of their ears and into the gutter.

elie_s_dad

I am trying to understand the justification of the title of this article. I googled Rutgers Football Stadium and don’t see anything related to the building of a new football stadium. So I guess the title is based on what the author of the above has seen in his crystal ball?

I am a Rutgers student. I think the plan to sever Camden is bad enough that one can explain it on its own (lack of) merits without resorting to inflammatory and divisive rhetorical gamesmanship.

If the plan is halted it will be because people sat in the same room with people they disagreed with and persuaded them of its flaws.

Tenured_Radical

Nonsense. Inflammatory and rhetorical gamesmanship is always a plus in the blogosphere. And yes it is the crystal ball prediction: I will bet you $100 that if the merger goes through this will happen, and that they will put the stadium in Camden framed as economic development. Good luck with the persuasion — I wish you well.

pcooke

I would ask that you check some of your facts regarding Douglass. As a current student, I can attest to the fact that the annual traditions of Douglass are still intact.
graddirector

As someone subjected dally to the press over Rutgers Camden, I am puzzled by this post. The complaint that I keep hearing in the press is that Rutgers Camden will lose prestige if it is merged with Rowan. This is because it is currently basking in the reflected “glory” of Rutgers New Brunswick.

Every time I hear that argument I cringe. I had the novel experience of interviewing for a faculty position at Rutgers Camden many years ago now. As I posted on another article, this was my top job interview from hell, with the Dean and department chair shouting at each other over dinner about whether the requirements for tenure at Rutgers Camden were the same as the New Brunswick campus.

Rutgers Camden is an important university as it sits in an intercity location and largely educates first generation college students. It has always received way fewer resources than the main campus from the state but at least at that time, faculty were being told that they had to meet the same scholarship standards for tenure as other Rutgers campuses even though they had larger teaching loads than the main campus, no Ph.D. program and few other scholarly resources either. This is because it was a Rutgers campus and this seemed reasonable to the Rutgers board of trustees. However, it has no way to be as “good of a school” as Rutgers New Brunswick and the graduates of Camden are not getting the same education as the flagship campus. Resources do matter here, particularly when working with a challenging student population. The state of New Jersey has never given sufficient resources to this school, even before the current budget angst, to make the impact on the Camden area that it could be capable of. This is not something that can be blamed on the Republicans either, this was true when New Jersey was a Democratic bastion as well, Rutgers Camden has always gotten the leavings from the Rutgers System, it has never been a priority.

Rowan is a much more similar school to Rutgers Camden than Rutgers New Brunswick is. It is a teaching intensive university that is in in much closer proximity to Camden than New Brunswick. From everything I have heard in the press and tenured radicial’s article, I still don’t see any real cause for complaint except for this school losing “prestige” that it really does not have on its own.. Now, the actually right answer is that Camden should have been given the state resources necessary to really make an impact on Camden over the past decades to present. Since that is not happening or likely to happen, moving it over to Rowan, one of the “second tier” state schools in New Jersey, is not some nefarious plot, just a bow to reality.