An Empirical Investigation into the Semantics of the Polish Modal musie\'c [must] with Aspect and Negation

Abstract

The present paper makes an attempt to employ concepts developed in philosophy and logic in order to explain natural language phenomena. The study centers on the meanings of the Polish modal verb musieć in relation to aspect and negation. It uses authentic language samples excerpted from Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego [The National Corpus of Polish]. It adapts the model of the semantic field of modal expressions (Kratzer, 1991) to disambiguate the modal, focusing on the characteristics of the conversational backgrounds that the speaker evaluates in expressing their modal evaluation of an event. The study proposes that the lack of modality-aspect and modality-negation interaction may be explained with the characteristics of the conversational backgrounds.