Relevance and modality

• Autores: José Luis Berbeira Gardón
• Localización: Alicante Journal of English Studies / Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses: RAEI, ISSN-e 2171-861X, ISSN 0214-4808, Nº. 11, 1998 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Relevance theory / coord. por José Mateo Martínez, Francisco Yus Ramos), págs. 3-22
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper sets out to reasess some relevance-theoretic analyses of the English modals, in particular Walton (1988), Groefsema(1995), Klinge (1993) and Berbeira Gardón (1996a), and show how a unified treatment of modal verbs is possible within the framework of Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory. Before going through each of these proposals one by one, a summary is offered of the main theoretical assumptions common to all of them. In the last two sections, it is argued that a unified account of the English modals can be given if we assume that they encode that the state of affairs described in the proposition expressed is located in a potential world. This proposal draws heavily on Wilson and Sperber's (1988) account of non-declarative sentences.