330 The subjectivity of utterance

(18) "Relative to what is known, it is possible that he will not come";

if it is given an objective deontic interpretation, its preposi­tional content will be

(19) "It is not permitted that he come".

Drawing intuitively and informally upon the notion of possible worlds (and neglecting the complications of tense) we can para­phrase (18) and (19), respectively, as:

(18a) "There is some epistemically possible world in which he

comes" (19a) "There is some deontically possible world in which he

comes".

In both cases, it will be noted, the modality is represented as something that holds, as a matter of fact, in some epistemic or deontic world which is external to whoever utters the sentence on particular occasions of utterance. This is what I mean by objective (or prepositional) modality. Both epistemic and deon­tic modality are always construed objectively in standard modal logic and in formal semantics.

However, independently of whether (17) is construed epis­temically or deontically, the modality associated with 'may' can be subjective, rather than objective: that is to say, in utter­ing this sentence, speakers (more generally, locutionary agents) may be expressing either their own beliefs and attitudes or their own will and authority, rather than reporting, as neutral obser­vers, the existence of this or that state of affairs. Subjective mod­ality is much more common than objective modality in most everyday uses of language; and objective epistemic modality, in particular, is very rare. If (17) is uttered with subjective epistemic, modality, it means something like

(20) "I-think-it-possible that he will not come"

(where the hyphenated "I-think-it-possible" is to be taken as a unit); if it is uttered with subjective deontic modality, it means something like "I forbid him to come".

10.5 Modality, modal expressions and mood 331

When I used the terms 'epistemic' and 'deontic' earlier, in connexion with the notion of illocutionary commitment, I talked as if the only options open to the locutionary agent were those of expressing full commitment and withholding full commit­ment. We now see that this is not so. As far as making statements is concerned, there are various ways in which locutionary agents can qualify their epistemic commitment. They can indicate that their evidence - their epistemic warrant or epistemic authority - for what they assert is less good than it might be; that their commitment is tentative, provisional or conditional, rather than absolute; and so on. Subjective epistemic modality is nothing other than this: a locutionary agent's qualification of his or her epistemic commitment. All natural spoken languages provide their users with prosodic resources - stress and inton­ation - with which to express the several distinguishable kinds of qualified epistemic commitment. Some, but by no means all, grammaticalize them in the category of mood; and some languages, such as English, lexicalize or semi-lexicalize them by means of modal verbs ('may', 'must', etc.), modal adjectives ('possible', etc.), modal adverbs ('possibly', etc.) and modal particles ('perhaps', etc.).

Assertion, in the technical sense of the term, implies full unqualified epistemic commitment. Relatively few of our every­day statements have this neutral, dispassionate, totally non-subjective character. English, however, does allow us to make statements which can be reasonably classified as assertions. It also allows us, as we have seen, to objectify both epistemic and deontic modality - propositionalizing the content of modal verbs or adverbs and bringing this within the scope of the illocutionary agent's unqualified "I-say-so". But English is certainly not typical of the world's languages in this respect. It may well be true, as we assumed in Chapter 8, that all lan­guages enable their users to make statements of one kind or another; it is not the case that all natural languages provide their users with the means of making modally unqualified assertions. Mood is by definition the category which results from the grammaticalization of modality (epistemic, deontic, or of whatever kind). In terms of this definition, it is a well-