334 The subjectivity of utterance

be assumed to coincide (see 3.2). Second, scholars who are inter­ested in such questions from a theoretical point of view tend to be philosophically, or metatheoretically, prejudiced in favour of one theory of linguistic semantics rather than another.

What can be said, however, is the following. There is a certain amount of empirical evidence to suggest that, as far as the gram-maticalization and lexicalization of modality in some, if not all, natural languages is concerned, epistemic modality is possibility-based, whereas deontic modality is necessity-based. There is perhaps stronger empirical evidence to support the view that in many, if not all, natural languages subjective mod­ality, both epistemic and deontic, is diachronically prior to objective modality and that, as has been mentioned earlier, it is much more commonly grammaticalized and lexicalized throughout the languages of the world,

It must also be noted, however, that (I) it is not always easy to distinguish epistemic modality synchronically from deontic modality and (ii) in English many expressions that were primar­ily deontic in earlier stages of the language are now used also in epistemically modalized utterances (cf. 'must' and now 'have (to)' in such utterances as You must / have to be joking). The fact that epistemic and deontic modality merge with one another diachronically and are often indistinguishable synchronically confirms the view, now widely held by linguists as well as by logicians, that they are rightly classified under the same term 'modality'.

But the most important conclusion to be drawn from recent investigations of the grammaticalization and lexicalization of modality in several languages is that objective (or propositional) aletheutic modality, as this is formalized in standard modal logic, should not be taken as basic - in any relevant sense of 'basic' - in the semantic, analysis of natural languages. Subjec­tive modality, like deixis (or, more generally, reference) is a part of utterance-meaning. But, also like deixis, it is encoded in the grammatical and lexical structure of most, if not all, natural languages and, in so far as it is encoded, or conventionalized, in language-systems, it is just as much part of sentence-meaning as is truth-conditionally explicable objective modality, which, as I

10.5 Modality, modal expressions and mood 335

have been emphasizing here, is less commonly encoded in nat­ural languages and may well be inexpressible in some.

A further point to be made about natural-language modality is that, although it has here been explicated in terms of necessity and possibility, many linguists have felt that this does violence to the facts: that, for epistemic modality at least, a three-term system is required. This view is reflected in many traditional treatments, which deal with subjective epistemic modality in terms of certainty, probability (or likelihood) and possibility.

A similar point can be made about natural-language quantifi­cation. As was mentioned earlier, there is a well-known paral­lelism between modality and quantification: between necessity and universal quantification and between possibility and exis­tential quantification. (As N and M - } and  - are duals, interdefinable under negation, so also are (x) and (Ex).) But in many natural languages, including English, the so-called quan­tifier system is not very satisfactorily handled in this way. In addition to 'all' and 'some', there are also such expressions as 'many', 'several', etc.: and 'some', in most everyday contexts, is not obviously related to the existential quantifier ("at least one").

Three kinds of modality have been discussed in this section: aletheutic, epistemic and deontic. Other kinds of modality (bou-leutic, dynamic, etc.) have also been recognized in recent years by both linguists and logicians; and considerable progress has been made in analysing their diachronic and synchronic connex­ions. So far there is no consensus among either linguists or logi­cians on the establishment of a comprehensive framework which is both theoretically coherent and empirically satisfac­tory. At the same time it must be emphasized that the accounts of modality (and mood) given in up-to-date reference grammars of English (and of a limited number of other languages) has been immeasurably improved by the attempt to apply to the description of natural languages one or other of the standard sys­tems of modal logic which were developed initially to handle aletheutic modality.