Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 88. kötet (1986)

Tanulmányok - Kiefer Ferenc: A modalitás fogalmáról [On the Notion of Modality] 3

36 KIEFEÄ FERENC On the Notion of Modality by FERENC KIEFER Modality is one of the most complex notions in Unguis tics. Traditionally modality has mostly been discussed in connection with sentence mood, i.e. it has been assumed that déclarative, interrogative, exclamative, imperative and desiderative sentences represent différent types of modality. Linguistic discussion has thus concentrated on the ways in which thèse modalities are expressed. In languages in which there is a more or less well-defined class of modal auxiliaries, the inquiry into modality has often been confined to the description of the meaning of thèse auxiliaries. This can also be considered to be part of linguistic tradition. In the logical tradition the notion of modality has been defined in terms of necessity and possibility. Necessity and possibility are logical operators: they map propositions onto propositions. There is also a third tradition, loosely connected with the first one, which considers modality as the various ways in which speaker's attitudes are expressed. Attitudinal operators are not logical operators, they do not map propositions onto propositions, rather they map propositions onto „evaluated" propositions. The „evaluated" propositions themselves are no longer propositions, they cannot be assigned truth-values. The main aim of the paper is to make more explicit the linguistic définitions of modality and to show that a synthesis which would integrate both the logical notion of modality and most of what linguistic tradition considers to belong to modality is quite feasible. The theoretical framework used in the paper is possible world semantics, more precisely, the possible world semantics used in Hintikka's epistemic logic. It is claimed that modality can be expressed both propositionally and nonpropositionally but in natural language the nonpropositional means seem to play a more central rôle. The nonpropositional expressions of modality include sentence adverbials, parentheticals, and modal particles.