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. ...