Modal Modal

Multiple Modals in Modern English: Use, History, and Structure of Periphrastic Modal Verbs

by Heather Marie Kosur

unpublished draft

Modal verbs are auxiliary verbs that express modality—the expression of possibility, necessity, permissibility, and... more Modal verbs are auxiliary verbs that express modality—the expression of possibility, necessity, permissibility, and contingency—in English. Multiple modals (double modals, triple modals) are periphrastic verb constructions characterized by the use of two or more modal verbs within a single verb phrase as in might could and used to could. Native speakers of many varieties of English including South Midland and Southern American Englishes, Northern British Englishes, Scottish Englishes, Irish Englishes, and Caribbean Englishes regularly use at least one multiple modal occasionally, particularly in facesaving contexts. First appearing in the English language approximately eight hundred years ago, multiple modals in Modern English most likely developed from Old English and subsequently Middle English modal constructions. Immigrants from Scotland and Northern England, in particular, influenced the spread of multiple modals to North America and the Caribbean during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although traditional linguistic analyses including the phrase-structure rule approach and the subcategorization approach allow for multiple modals provided that one modal is a full verb with a base form, multiple modals are not phrases generated by a syntactic rule but rather periphrastic verb forms similar to phrasal verbs, noun compounds, and other periphrastic idioms. The argument for multiple modals as single lexical items is supported by the syntactic and semantic restrictions on multiple modal constructions including the limited number of naturally occurring combinations.