Abstract
The chapter examines how specific modal constructions of the Italian language in a concrete context of argumentative discussion can function as indicators for the reconstruction and evaluation of arguments put forth in ordinary discourse . The chapter examines a segment of the Italian modal system comprising different constructions with verbs potere ‘may, can’ and, especially, dovere ‘must’, which have direct or indirect epistemic interpretations. A special focus is represented the constructions DEVEE and DOVREBBEE based on the verb dovere. In these constructions the basic context-dependent relational semantics is enriched by subtle constraints on the evidential source. As a result, the two constructions end up guiding the establishing of argumentative relations of very specific kinds, differing not only in the expressed strength of support or degree of commitment towards the conclusion , but also along a series of parameters including the nature and epistemic status of the premises , the presence of rebuttals , the semantic type of the standpoint , and the argumentative locus invoked. At the same time, the studies in this chapter aim at understanding how the social and material ontology of the contexts in which argumentative discussions take place is reflected in the semantic structure of argumentative discourse in the area of modality . To do so, the chapter unravels how argumentation and modality intertwine in the genre of business-financial newspaper articles by focusing on acts of prediction , which represents a key speech-act in view of the whole functioning of the interaction field of financial communication.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The project was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant: 100012-120740/1) from 2008 to 2011.
- 3.
- 4.
The software is freely available from Mick O’Donnell (http://www.wagsoft.com/CorpusTool/).
- 5.
The unit of annotation chosen for predictive speech acts is the discourse act (cf. Béguelin 2002), or, using the terminology of Congruity Theory minimal discourse sequence (cf. Rigotti 1993). Theoretically, it corresponds to the minimal semiotic gesture characterized by a relatively autonomous meaning, or, equivalently, being assigned a pragmatic predicate / connective predicate . For purposes of delimitation it corresponds (a) to the sentence, that is to the maximal domain of binding relations or (b) to all parts of a sentence that the journalist singles out as a relatively autonomous unit of meaning via the use of punctuation. We have annotated as predictive those sequences that contain at least a reference to the future construed as outside the control of the speaker or of the hearer (cf. Miecznikowski et al. 2012: 75).
- 6.
It is worth noting that the practice of characterizing modalities primarily by placing them on a scale of strength is widespread well beyond the confines of argumentation theory. In applied linguistics and discourse analysis, for instance, a particularly influential proposal in this sense is the one originating from M.A.K. Halliday and Systemic Functional Linguistics, which involves a scale encompassing high, median and low modalities. According to Halliday (1994: 356): “modality is the area of meaning that lies between yes and no – the intermediate ground between negative and positive polarity”. A recent elaboration of Halliday’s ideas on modal qualification in discourse is found in Martin and White (2005: 13-17), who include a treatment of modal qualifying expressions in terms of probability scales in the descriptive apparatus of their Appraisal Theory. This work has become increasingly influential in discourse analysis as well as in the design of sentiment analysis software applications. Here probability is one of several scalar dimensions along which a modal expression’s contribution is plotted. Three “regions of meaning” are distinguished along the probability continuum: low, median and high. We are not, however, speaking of probability values in any mathematical sense. For Martin and White (2005: 54–55) the probability scales correspond to an intuitively characterized judgment or “social sanction” of veracity.
- 7.
- 8.
See Chap. 2, § 2.2.3.1. According to Aristotle “those opinions are reputable (endoxa) which are accepted by everyone or by the majority or by the wise—i.e. by all, or by the majority, or by the most notable and reputable of them.” (Topics I 100b 21-23, transl. by W.A. Pickard-Cambridge, Revised Oxford Translation in Aristotle 2014).
- 9.
On the variable force of maxims see Chap. 2, § 2.2.3.3.
- 10.
See the analysis of this discourse relation in terms of Congruity Theory in Chap. 5, § 5.3.4.3, Deff. 16 and 19. In Congruity Theory, connective predicates are constructs allowing the analysis of illocutionary-level discourse relations in terms of the (presuppositional) constraints they imposes on their conjuncts as well as on discourse participants and in terms of the illocutionary effects that the interpretation of the discourse sequence achieves.
- 11.
On the distinction between conceptual and procedural encoding in language see the classic paper of Wilson and Sperber (recently republished as Wilson and Sperber 2012).
- 12.
These examples are not part of the main corpus used for the present Chap.. They are part of a chronologically earlier sample of the same Italian newspapers collected for Rocci (2011).
- 13.
- 14.
This does not mean that the deontic interpretation is flatly the default interpretation of the modal . The context still has to satisfy certain fundamental semantic requirements for a deontic interpretation to be available. See, for instance, the discussion of deontic vs. anankastic readings in Chap. 5.
- 15.
Here it would be easy to come up with apparent exceptions, but these prima facie counterexamples do not bear closer scrutiny. For instance, someone could infer the future shortage of a raw material from the planned end of the production of a product (e.g. planned end of production of internal combustion engines predicts end of fossil fuels). In reality, this inference is not directly based on an inference from product to material cause, but on guessing the reasoning behind a human plan. In turn, the plan is based on a forward looking inference from (lack of) material cause to the (lack of) product. So, the exception is only apparent.
- 16.
A series of filters and adjustments are then applied to the results of this formula to ensure the relevance of the extracted keywords. In particular, the keyword list generated only includes (a) words that appear more than 8 times both in the target and in the reference corpus, (b) words that appear in more than one text in the target. Additionally, the keyness of words that occur less than 20 times is reduced proportionally to how much less than 20 the count is (e.g. a word occurring 10 times will have its keyness halved).
- 17.
See Mc Closkey (1990) on conditional predictions in the discourse of economics.
- 18.
The whole article contains 12 modal expressions (modal auxiliaries and modal adverbs.
- 19.
The possibility of this reading in the remote past tense is often omitted in the semantic literature on modality in Italian as well as in the grammars, but it is perfectly natural and appears rather frequently in novels as a point of view marking device. This use is exemplified in the following discourse sequence:
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Giovanni dovette prendere una scorciatoia. Perché arrivò là prima di tutti quel giorno.
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Giovanni must-ind-rem-pst-3rd-sing take a shortcut. Because he arrived there before everybody else that day’
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Arguably, Giovanni took a shortcut. Because he arrived there before everybody else that day’.
In these remote past uses of dovere the inference is never situated in the past and remains anchored to the origo of the utterance (speaker and speech time). In other words, the past tense morpheme reads like a raised constituent taking scope on the prejacent alone rather than on the modal . As shown in Chap. 5, the origo (the starting reference point for deixis) can indeed shift to the past (or even to the future) when the epistemic modal is embedded under indirect reported speech or under an attitude verb. Under appropriate contextual conditions in narrative discourse the same shift can be caused by free indirect discourse (cf. Rocci 2005b: 239–259; Hacquard 2010). Interestingly, these shifted interpretations with embedding of the modal or with free indirect discourse are only possible with the imperfect form of dovere (doveva). Thus the remote past cases remain unembeddable and always anchored to the hic et nunc of the utterance.
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- 20.
This Chap. uses the term eventuality to indicate the genus of the states, processes or events (cf. Bach 1986) denoted by finite and non-finite clauses and by nominalizations (e.g. abstract nouns). Eventualities are located in time and have specific temporal properties according to their type (e.g. bounded events vs. unbounded processes). It has been frequently observed that the type of eventuality denoted by the prejacent of a modal verb, jointly with its temporal location, plays a role in restricting the interpretation of the modal (cf., for Italian, Bertinetto 1979; Pietrandrea 2005). In the present Chap. the question of the precise nature of these constraints on interpretation will remain in the background. Note, also, that this Chap. never uses the term eventuality in the unrelated sense of “possibility ”, as in, for instance, when one speaks of the eventuality (= possibility) reading of the French subjunctive mood.
- 21.
The possibility for the modals to signal sentence internal, and even clause-internal (Hobbs 2010) argumentative relations had already been observed in Chap. 5, § 5.2.1. It seems to occur, in particular, with DOVREBBEE in contexts where nominalized eventualities appear as causal arguments for the prejacent proposition . A similar pattern is described for the conditional possibility modal potrebbe in Miecznikowski (2011).This kind of micro-argumentation relying on nominalized eventualities for the manifestation of its premises is, however, not the only possibility: inter sentential argumentative relations can be easily signaled by dovere.
- 22.
For reasons of space here I do not discuss the ultimately temporal or aspectual nature of the constraint or whether it can be reduced to more general principles of interaction between modality and tense-aspect semantics . See Pietrandrea (2005: 133-186). In every case, it is difficult not to think that this constraint must have something to do with the epistemic and ontological asymmetry existing between the future and the past (cf. § 6.4.1 below).
- 23.
These observations on the future reference uses of future tense should suggest a reconsideration of the use of Italian data in theoretical discussions of the relationship between tense and modality . For instance, while I am sympathetic with Ludlow’s (1999) thesis that the Italian future tense morpheme is, not only etymologically but also semantically, a modal , his statement that in Italian “when the future is used, it is most likely being used to express possibility or uncertainty” (Ludlow 1999: 159) is not entirely warranted.
- 24.
I note, in passing, that with respect to causality and to several other relevant criteria, the epistemic future is much closer to DEVEE than to DOVREBBEE.
- 25.
As it sometimes the case with Aristotelian texts, in De Interpretatione, 9 it is not easy to say what exactly Aristotle wants to say – as Hintikka (1973: 145) puts it: “what is the discussion all about?”. Historically established interpretations have become entrenched, but they do not necessarily hold up on closer examination, as argued by Hintikka (1973) for this passage. Here I do not enter in the detailed exegesis of the Aristotelian passage, as my goal is far more modest. I introduce the problem of future truth as the backdrop of for a view of all statements about the future as modal .
- 26.
- 27.
Partly similar considerations could be made for the semantics of the conditional of the possibility modal (potrebbe). This analysis, however, exceeds the limits of the present study. The issue has been addressed in Miecznikowski (2011).
- 28.
English translation of this example is a problem, for the simple reason that the English modals are not the Italian modals. If one translates può with may the problem in the Italian version completely disappears. If we use can for the translation we might be recreating something similar to the problem in the Italian original, but it’s hard to exclude the presence of unrelated issues brought in by the English modal . The possibility or impossibility of epistemic can and its possible functioning as a marker of inferential relations could be the object of an independent investigation, and a complex one at that, because it would require considering recent diachronic change in the use of this modal, as well as dialectal variation between British and American English (cf. Coates 1995).
- 29.
More precisely, we have here an instance of the argumentation scheme from the cause to the effect. This argumentation scheme exploits the basic entailments of the commonsense ontology of causation to infer a conclusion . If we admit that ‘p causes q’ entails that, for all the worlds where certain physical laws hold, wherever p is the case, q is also the case, we can use this entailment to infer q from p. For an in-depth discussion of contemporary theories of argument schemes and a theoretical proposal making explicit the connection between argument schemes and commonsense ontologies see Rigotti and Greco Morasso (2010).
- 30.
Additionally, the incompleteness of the information available to the agents is ignored as the markets are presumed to be informationally efficient.
- 31.
Compare with the inferential chain: Lions can be dangerous & Lambert is a lion, therefore Lambert may be dangerous.
- 32.
- 33.
Not all deontic conversational backgrounds need to combine with circumstantial ones: directive and commissive ones already originating from singular commands or singular promises do not.
- 34.
In terms of the typology of conversational backgrounds that I have adopted in Chap. 5, a reportative conversational background can be considered a sub-type of the epistemic conversational background, corresponding to the beliefs to which the source is committed (the beliefs of the source’s social persona, independently of their sincerity). The speaker may or may not associate herself with this belief set. Faller (2011) argues that certain reportatives fall outside the scope of epistemic modality and should be based on a separate informational conversational background because they can be used also when the speaker does not believe the prejacent. This is consistent with her adoption of a strict definition of epistemic modality in terms of knowledge. In fact, the broader definition of epistemicity in terms of a set of beliefs associated with an information source which was adopted in Chap. 5, can be more advantageous in dealing with issues of evidentiality , subjectivity vs. intersubjectivity, polyphony and point of view that arise with epistemic modals .
- 35.
In deductive reasoning BDox will typically contain more or less probable or plausible propositions that are invoked as major premises in the deduction (cf. also Desclès and Guentchéva 2001: 115–116). In abductive reasoning , BDox will crucially also contain the assumption that besides p there are no other explanatory hypotheses worth considering . See the discussion of abduction in footnote 21, above.
- 36.
It is fair to mention here that the notion that a proposition p can be entailed by B without being part of B requires us to go beyond the ontology of propositions presupposed by possible worlds semantics , and thus beyond the Kratzerian view of the conversational background . If each proposition of B is just a set of possible worlds at which it is true, and B is just the inter of all these sets, giving the set of possible worlds at which all the propositions are true, for any proposition p being a consequence of B and being a set of worlds included in the inter are one and the same thing. In order to distinguish between the two one needs either to consider propositions as mental representations and see B as a set of mental representations (cf. Papafragou 2000), or to model the semantics of the modals dynamically as test operations on the state of information (see Portner 2009: 85-105 for a concise and relatively accessible presentation of the dynamic semantics literature). I will not pursue this matter further in this paper.
- 37.
I do not discuss here the purely temporal use of the Italian conditional , where the morpheme is used as a mark of “future in the past”. In Rocci (2006) I briefly discuss how the temporal meaning of posteriority could be derived from a modal meaning of causal necessity , in parallel with a modal analysis of the Italian future tense presented in Rocci (2000) and Rocci (2005b).
- 38.
Explaining how people manage to constantly adapt their idea of “what is normally the case” is certainly a very complex matter, but perhaps this complexity is wholly pragmatic and should not be saddled onto the semantics of modal expressions. This pragmatic solution contrasts with the semantic one proposed by Kratzer (2012 [1981]) with ordering semantics (see Chap. 4, § 4.3.4 for a brief discussion of the basics of ordering sources and Chap. 5, § 5.3.2.3 for a more in-depth application to practical reasoning ).
- 39.
As mentioned above, the importance of presumptions of normality had already been pointed out in relation to the functioning of DEVRAITE by Tasmowski and Dendale (1994: 50-51). Conversational backgrounds corresponding to normal conditions feature prominently also in Kratzer’s (1981) classic paper. Kratzer calls these conversational backgrounds stereotypical. Kratzer (1981: 47) characterizes as follows the kind of worlds picked by a stereotypical background: “Worlds in which the normal course of events is realized are a complete bore, there are no adventures or surprises. The concept of a normal course of events is analogous to the concept of ‘frame’ which plays an important role in psychology and artificial intelligence”. In Kratzer’s analysis stereotypical backgrounds intervene as secondary conversational backgrounds in the ordering semantics . They are ordering sources restricting the world quantification operated on the worlds of the basic conversational background . In Kratzer’s analysis a stereotypical epistemic necessity modal would not quantify over all possible worlds compatible with what is known, but only on the subset of worlds that are closest to being stereotypical. That is on those at which the greatest number of stereotypical propositions (that is, more concretely, frames, scripts, stereotypes, etc.) are the case. As observed above in footnote 29, the present analysis of DOVREBBEE assigns a greater role to pragmatics – and to local processes of discourse coherence – tries not to put into the semantics of the modal a mechanism as complex and as cognitively implausible (Papafragou 2000) as the ordering of possible worlds. Instead of using Kratzer’s set of “boring worlds”, at which all stereotypes are true, as a yardstick to define a set of “closest to boring yet realistic” worlds on which DOVREBBEE quantifies, the present analysis simply has a locally salient set of conditions C providing the restriction. This set only contains those stereotypes (those Aristotelian eikota and endoxa) that are recoverable in the discourse context . This means, however, that the expression recoverable in the discourse context should be given a not too vague meaning. As mentioned in the conclusion , a tighter integration of the semantic analysis of the modals with explicit accounts of discourse structure and processing is needed.
- 40.
It should be noted that the presence of the causative riflettersi in as the lower verb in the modal construction arguably plays an important role in (62). Miecznikowski (2011), in her analysis of the conditional possibility modal potrebbe, observed its frequent occurrence with event nominals as surface subjects and causatives as lower verbs. Space reasons impose that I save a discussion of this phenomenon and, more generally, of issues of syntax-semantics mapping for another occasion.
- 41.
In construction grammar asymmetric inheritance is used to represent the semantic motivation. Inheritance links are posited “between constructions which are related both semantically and syntactically […] to capture the fact that two constructions may be in some ways the same and in other ways distinct” (Goldberg 1995: 72).
- 42.
- 43.
For instance, if we were to add a finite verb to the verbless protasis in (18) it would rather be an indicative future form (se verrà confermato in futuro) than an imperfect subjunctive one (se venisse confermato in futuro).
- 44.
I have already mentioned how in our texts economic causality is, in certain respects, treated as if it were physical causality. The pervasive and sometime subtle use of physical metaphors in economic and financial discourse addressing experts and laypeople is an important issue (cf. Richardt 2003) that overlaps significantly with the expression of alethic causal notions in predictions through the use of modal as well as of aspectual lexicon and morphology.
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Rocci, A. (2017). Case Studies of Italian Modal Constructions in Context. In: Modality in Argumentation. Argumentation Library, vol 29. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1063-1_6
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