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GÜNTER RADDEN, Meaningful Grammar

tion to act, as in (12b). Sentence (12c) literally describes the same state
as sentence (12a) and, therefore, should be incompatible with the ad-
verbial absolutely, but it is not. Its acceptability can be explained by the
presence of the time expression by ten o’clock, which sets an endpoint
by which a situation must be completed. States do not have set end-
points, so we must be dealing with an event preceding the state (of
being in bed). We therefore understand the sentence metonymically
in the sense of performing an action in order to achieve the state, i.e.
‘to go to bed’. In its metonymic sense of obligation, the deontic attitude
thus allows the sentence to be intensified by absolutely.
Secondly, the distinction between subjective and objective modal-
ity is more pronounced in deontic modality than in epistemic modality.
May and must are subjective modals, can and have (got) to are objective
modals. The epistemic difference between This must be true and This has
to be true may be negligible, but the deontic difference between You must
pay the bill and You have to pay the bill can be very significant in social in-
teraction. With deontic must, an obligation is laid upon you by the
speaker, with deontic have to, the obligation comes from external cir-
cumstances and the speaker is no longer felt to be responsible. We hate
to be bossed around by other people but are willing to accept rules and
regulations. It doesn’t come as a surprise, therefore, that the use of de-
ontic, but not epistemic, must has dramatically decreased in recent
times. In American English, must has almost completely been ousted by
(have) got to and have to, a shift that has been attributed to democratiza-
tion and colloquialization (Myhill 1996, Collins 2005).These develop-
ments might well be the result of people’s increased awareness of the
fact that language does not exist in a vacuum.
Intrinsic modality is concerned with potentialities arising from
intrinsic qualities of an entity. There are only two poles of intrinsic
modality: intrinsic possibility and intrinsic necessity. Intrinsic possi-
bility and necessity can be distinguished from epistemic possibility
and necessity by using paraphrases that focus on the entity in intrinsic
modality and on the state of affairs in epistemic modality:

(13a) My cat can be a real nuisance.
‘It is possible for my cat to be a real nuisance’.
[intrinsic possibility]

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