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(or just like "Resources for The Big Paper")

 

 

Summary presentations of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem (http://www.miskatonic.org/godel.html) - applicability to linguistics?

links for linguistic takes on modals/must/have-to:

• email exchange between some guy and a linguistics professor at the University of Michigan
• The same professor has his fingers in a million pies and a web site that lists them.
   
• lecture notes from a linguistics class at the University of Victoria
   
• A paper on Meta-States and modal verbs in English (maybe useful, maybe zealotry)
   

start http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue/modals.html

• It seems to me from about a month's attention to a.u.e [alt.usage.english] that a large number of the questions and disputes have to do with negation (and negative polarity items like 'any( )more') and modality ('must', 'will', 'have to', 'going to', subjunctives, et very complex cetera), and especially to their interaction. Negation and modality are very closely related to one another in semantics in all kinds of ways.
   
• As to this discussion, the usual oppositions are those between
  

  will	-	and	-	be going to	/g@n@/
  /				\
  and				and
  \				/
  must	-	and	-	have to	/haeft@/

  a four-way distinction; and as well between the logical classes of
  Deontic (two-place, social permission/obligation) modals, and
  Epistemic (one-place, logical possibility/necessity) modals;
   
  and between the logical classes of
   
  Necessity (social obligation, universal, "square") modality, and
  Possibility (social permission, existential, "diamond");
   

• Will and must are both Necessary-class modal auxiliary verbs, and are, like most modals in most languages, ambiguous between
  Deontic
  a) If he will do it, ... [means "If he's willing to", not simple future will, banned in 'if'-clauses]
  b) Cinderella must be home by midnight.
  and Epistemic:
  a) It will rain tonight. [certainty in expression of the future; logical, not social]
  b) This must be the place. [certainty in expression of logical conclusion]
   
• Since modals cannot be inflected, and since all auxiliary verbs in an English verb phrase (except the first) must be inflected, whether finite or not, modals are limited to first position in the verb phrase (where they must be followed by an infinitive).
• Verbs in English VP's must follow a strict sequence
  (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue/tense.html#vp).
   
• The canonical paraphrase for must is have to, idiosyncratically (but universally, in America) pronounced /haeft@/. It, too, has inflected parts: /haeft@/, /haest@/, /haedt@/, since these are only semantically but not (yet) syntactically modal auxiliaries, they appear with do-Support when negated:
  You don't have to /haeft@/ do that. NOT [OBLIGED [Vb]] He didn't have to /haeft@/ say that.
  The first of these are very different from the negated modal must:
  You must not do that. OBLIGED [NOT [Vb]]
  and the second uses both negation and Perfective to provide a very different meaning:
  He must not have said that. NECESSARY [NOT [Perf [Vb]]]
  'must' must precede a negative or a Perfective have, producing
  NECESSARY/OBLIGED [NOT [V]], and NECESSARY [Perf [Vb]].
  The laws of causality, and the limits of the imperative mood ("Canute's Law") prohibit OBLIGED [Perf [Vb]], and the rules of English syntax prohibit most other configurations with true modal auxiliaries. have to furnishes a quasi-pseudo-semi-hemi-demi-must for such purposes, and an alternative must available for occasional contrasts.
  In sum, it is very useful, one may even say vital, to English speakers to have this degree of flexibility in the modality department. English may have only remnants of its mood (=modality) inflections left, like the various subjunctives, but it has lots more nascent morphology that's already almost paradigmatic. As with the Northern Cities Chain Shift, one can see an actual language change in progress here.
  The keyword for this phenomenon in the linguistic literature, by the way, is "grammaticalization".

Properties of auxiliary verbs as a class: NICE
N egation: only Auxiliary verbs can appear with negative particles behind them.
I nversion: Only auxiliary verbs can invert in root questions and certain other contexts
C ontraction: only auxiliary verbs contract with 'not'
E llipsis: only auxiliary verbs can be used in this pattern: {If anyone + aux_verb + VP, NP + aux_verb}

L1 (ASL) interference among hearning-impared Ss fits expectations based on bilingual studies.

In fact, much of these Ss difficulty in aquiring written English is attributed to out-dated pedagogical practices much like the ones favored by traditional/pre-Krashen TESOL practitioners. A major commonality is that they tend to deal strictly with syntax at the sentence level with little or no contextual clues to facilitate understanding & acquisition of the structure being presented.

As a result, modal forms, among others, have never been adequately tested among the hearing-impaired

This reflects the traditional practice of teaching English with emphasis on syntax in isolated sentences. Understanding and using modal auxiliaries in English requires more contextual information than one typically finds packed into a single sentence. No wonder modal forms are widely acknowledged in TESOL as difficult topics, usually reserved for the most advanced students.

citation: hearing children tend to produce modal expressions at about 2-1/2 yrs, but favor deonic over epistemic forms until about 4-6 yrs.

Theoretical Prediction Hypothesis - hearing-impaired Ss' acquisition of modal forms follows a sequence corresponding to the forms' theoretical complexity
Developmental Prediction Hypothesis - mirrors hearning children's acquisition order
Syntactic Prediction Hypothesis - based on syntactic considerations like negation, contraction, tag-questions ...

Paper compares three Hypothesis' predictions regarding English modal acquisition in hearing-impaired Ss.