Deontic On Modality in Spanish Mar Biezma, UMass Amherst a THE PROBLEM: Bosque (1980) characterizes the Spanish example in (1) as an imperative. As Bosque notes, the innitive form haber (have.Aux.Inf) in (1) is the most common version of the prescriptively accepted imperative form habed (have.Aux.Imp), which shows canonical imperative morphology. Bosque considers that examples like (1) are important because they refer to the past, and present a counterexample to the crosslinguistic generalization that imperatives are future oriented. Examples like (1) also present a problem for proposals claiming that imperatives in Spanish lack an Aspect projection (Biezma 2007). This paper shows that (1) is not an imperative, and oers a better analysis in terms of covert modality. BOSQUES ARGUMENTS: Bosque provides several arguments in favor of characterizing (1) as an imperative: (a) it cannot be responded with That is false (does not have a truth value); (b) it may only have a second person addressee; and (c) it cannot be embedded, (2). AGAINST AN IMPERATIVE ANALYSIS: It is worth noting that in the Corpus of reference of Spanish there isnt a single occurrence of the canonical imperative form habed used as an auxiliary. The claim that examples with inntival auxiliaries like (1) are truly imperatives has to be defended in the absence of canonical imperatives forms. ARGUMENTS: (i) The fact that one cannot answer (1) with That is false, does not mean it is an imperative. A sentence like (3) cannot be answered that way either, but an analysis in terms of imperatives would not be desirable; (ii) contrary to what Bosque claims, the constructions in (1) can refer to 3rd person, (4); (iii) constructions like (1) admit stative predicates, (5.a), impossible in regular imperatives, but, crucially, possible with modals, (5.b). However, to say that examples like (1) are not imperatives does not amount to saying that they are regular innitival clauses. Regular innitival clauses are either controlled or generic. But sentences like (1) are not: they always make reference to a 2nd or 3rd person agent provided by the context (the impossibility of embedding these clauses can be understood as a way of avoiding control). QUANTIFICATIONAL FORCE: Examples like (1) exhibit variation in terms of modal strength depending on context, (6) and (7). (6) encodes deontic necessity (paraphrased by should). (7) resembles deontic possibility (paraphrased by could, but the interpretation is a bit stronger). PROPOSAL: We have seen that a covert modal analysis of examples like (1) is preferable to an imperative one. But it is necessary to explain why the modal exhibits variation in quanticational force. The covert modal in examples like (1) behaves dierently from overt modals in Spanish. However, it is similar to modals in Sttimcets described by a Matthewson et al. (2006). They propose an analysis in which quanticational force is by determined a choice function, (8). The modal in (8) has a contextually determined modal base, b, that matches the evaluation world w with the set of possible worlds that are accessible from it. The novelty in (8) is the presence of a free choice function, f, that picks out a subset of b(w) (Kratzer 1998). f is a free variable whose value is determined by context (Kratzer 1998). In (8), the force of the modal depends on the subset of b(w) that f picks up, q. If q = b(w), we get the strongest version of the modal. If q is a proper subset of b(w), the modals is weaker. This also allows us to get the middle ground between necessity and possibility modals described above, that modals with lexicalized quanticational force cannot capture. CONCLUSION: Unlike Bosque (1980) I claim that data like (1) involve covert modality, and not imperative operators. A modal analysis provides a better explanation for the temporal properties of (1), it can account for the true generalizations noted by Bosque, and provides
a better explanation for variability in quanticational force. (1) Haber venido ayer. have.Aux.Inf come yesterday You should have come yesterday
[Bosque 1980, ex. (1)]
(2) Creo que *( deber haber venido ayer. as) think.1.sg that should have.Inf come yesterday I think that you should have come (3) Hubieras venido antes. have.Aux.2.sg.Subj come earlier (4) A: We will have to see what Flix thinks. [free translation] e B: Flix no piensa. No est. Haber e a venido ! Felix neg. thinks neg is have.Aux.Inf come Felix does not think. He is not even here. He should have come! [rae.crea] (5) a. Haber -lo sabido antes ! / b. Deber saber-lo antes. as have.Inf cl.Acc known before should know-it earlier (6) My son is complaining. He is not al...