Saturday, September 17, 2005
Ought the Modal
Wouldn’t that be a good name for a character in a children’s book? Anyway, here’s Arnold Zwicky this summer at ASD-L:
“ought” is an interesting case; for most speakers these days it’s
just barely a modal. like the central modals, it’s finite-only (*to
ought to VP). for a lot (but not all) speakers, it can be negated,
either affixally or with “not” (you oughtn’t/ought not to talk like
that); this is marginal for me. however, most modern american
speakers can’t invert positive “ought” (*ought you to talk so loud?),
though if you get “oughtn’t” you can probably invert it (oughtn’t you
to talk louder?). i think that very few people can get VP ellipsis
with “ought” (*I ought to leave, and you ought, also); instead,
infinitival “to” allows ellipsis (I ought to leave, and you ought to,
also).so “ought” is a bit like the modal “must”, and is also a bit like the
non-modal obligative verb “have” (I hate to have to tell you this, *I
haven’t to eat this, *Have I to eat this? *You have to eat this, and
I have, also). the crucial modal property of “ought”, however, is
the first one, the finite-only restriction, which would predict that
“ought” cannot be the complement of a modal (since modals take base-
form VP complements), so that “shouldn’t ought to” ought to be
ungrammatical. ...
Gemination: Consonantal ‘Twinning’
Earlier this year in English Today:
Gemination in English
Alan S. Kaye a1
a1 Professor of Linguistics, California State University, FullertonAn account of consonantal ‘twinning’ in English and other languages.
THIS ESSAY concerns itself with gemination in English, but more specifically, it asks whether English has consonantal gemination (CG), as has been reported by some in the literature. Gemination is usually defined as a phonetic doubling (cf. Latin geminus ‘twin’); however, phonetic length (as opposed to a single or nongeminated segment) is a more accurate designation (see Matthews 1997:141, who cites Italian atto [at[Length mark]o] ‘act’, making reference only to ‘doubling’). It has long been known that English does not have contrastive CG as is recognized, say, from the phonemic difference between Classical and Modern Standard Arabic kasara (‘he broke’) and kassara (‘he smashed’) or darasa (‘he studied’) and darrasa (‘he taught’).
English Today (2005), 21: 43-55 Cambridge University Press
Copyright © 2005 Cambridge University Press