Abstract
In this chapter, I analyse the contribution made by have to the meanings expressed in sentences with a (central) modal verb followed by a perfect infinitive. Four meanings are discussed: (a) have as a marker that locates the possibility or necessity in the past; (b) have as a marker that establishes a relation of anteriority between the modal meaning (of possibility or necessity) and the situation referred to, (c) have as a marker of counterfactual meaning, (d) have as a marker of actualization. In the first part of the chapter an empirical overview is given. Drawing on the discussion in Chap. 2, I then address the question of how the role of the context should be captured, more specifically, whether it is saturation or free pragmatic enrichment that plays a role in bringing about the different meanings of non-finite have when it combines with a modal.
I am very grateful to Susan Reed, for insightful discussion of a draft of this paper, and for her critical observations on the notion of ‘factual have’ (Depraetere 2009), which was relabelled in terms of the more accurate ‘actualisation have’ on her suggestion.
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Notes
- 1.
I follow Van der Auwera and Plungian (1998) in restricting the study to those semantic fields which involve the contrast between possibility and necessity. Will and shall will therefore not be included in the overview.
- 2.
The examples are from the British English component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), the British National Corpus (BNC) or from the web (www).
- 3.
I will use the label ‘modal situation’ (M) to refer to the modal meaning of possibility or necessity and I will use ‘residue’ (R) to refer to the proposition, or, as Huddleston (1984: 168) puts it, to ‘what is left of the meaning expressed in an utterance of the clause when the modality is abstracted away.’ Others (e.g. Laca 2008) use the term ‘prejacent’. M is located in time (past, present, future) and there is either a relation of anteriority, simultaneity or posteriority between M and R.
- 4.
For a discussion of the different sets of conceptual distinctions, see Depraetere and Salkie, Chap. 1 of this volume.
- 5.
Given the aim of the chapter is not possible to address in detail the defining criteria of the modal meanings. See Depraetere and Reed (2011) and Depraetere (2014) for a discussion of the modal taxonomy adopted in this chapter. The tables below summarize the defining features that underlie the meaning distinctions:
Table 16.a Taxonomy of root possibility in Depraetere and Reed (2011: 17) Table 16.b Taxonomy of root necessity in Depraetere (2014) - 6.
The hypotheses put forward here are based on the analysis of examples from the BNC and ICE-GB, supplemented with queries on the web. Even though most of the gaps can be explained, admittedly, this methodology has its limitations, and therefore the analysis may need to be fine-tuned if examples of what are now considered gaps were to be found.
- 7.
For instance, the following example has a General situation possibility reading:
-
(i)
Boating accidents involving open motorboats, personal watercrafts (PWCs) or cabin motorboats are commonly reported cases. Accidents may happen due to collisions with fixed objects or moving vessels, capsizing or sinking, fire or explosion, falls or ejection overboard and other circumstances. Often, negligence resulting from operator inattention is the foremost contributing factor in a case of accidents on boats, according to the Boating Accident Report Database (BARD) system. (www) (Depraetere and Reed 2011: 22)
When have is added, a General situation possibility reading is no longer available and epistemic meaning is communicated:
-
(ii)
Accidents may have happened due to collisions with fixed objects or moving vessels, capsizing or sinking, fire or explosion, falls or ejection overboard and other circumstances.
-
(i)
- 8.
The overview states that no examples can be found of Narrow scope external necessity and General situation necessity with actualisation meaning; as will be pointed out on p. 277 and p. 279, have in combination with should occurs in actualisation (NSEN and GSN) contexts, but the examples I found all contain so-called putative should.
- 9.
See example (29) for discussion.
- 10.
See example (40) for discussion.
- 11.
In both (17) and (18) there is reference to a hypothetical situation, but it is located the past when the perfect infinitive is used and in the present (He could buy a gun, He might take the role of king) when the present infinitive is used.
- 12.
I did not find any examples of opportunity meaning with might and actualization have.
- 13.
The difference in communicative effect between the perfect infinitive and the present infinitive is that in the former case the paraphrase is ‘any exam that it would have been possible for me to give them (in the past)’ whereas in the latter case it is ‘any exam that it would be possible for me to give them (in the present)’. In other words, have locates the (imaginary) modal situation in the past.
- 14.
Coates (1983: 64) argues that unlike in the case of epistemic modals, where ‘the HAVE + EN construction affects the time reference of the main predication, not of the modal predication [M situation]’, ‘with SHOULD it is the modal predication which is affected. (…) HAVE + EN with SHOULD seems to be a kind of suppletive for the past tense.’ She makes this point in connection with counterfactual examples, the modality of which is located in the past. The overview so far has already shown that the functions of have are indeed wider than those of expressing past time or counterfactuality.
- 15.
An alternative interpretation (p.c. Susan Reed) might be in terms of epistemic necessity, whereby it might be the interviewer drawing a conclusion along the lines of ‘you must have done it because (there was no alternative) …’ so as to make the interviewee more comfortable with confessing.
- 16.
Susan Reed (p.c.) has brought to my attention the following example, from Bram Stoker’s novel (1897) Dracula, in which must have does express counterfactuality;
-
(i)
“I must have been asleep, for certainly if I had been fully awake I must have noticed the approach to such a remarkable place.”
Must have noticed here clearly means ‘I wouldn’t have been able to avoid noticing’.
-
(i)
- 17.
Leech (2009: 117) writes: ‘In I’m surprised that your wife should object, it is the ‘very idea of it’ that surprises me; in I’m surprised that your wife objects, I am surprised by the objection itself, which I take to be known ‘fact’.’
- 18.
See Lowrey (2012: 12–15) for a discussion on the historical development of the meanings of should.
- 19.
See Depraetere and Reed (2011: 13–16) for a more detailed discussion of this distinguishing feature.
- 20.
In the following example, the context establishes a past time ‘thought’ vantage point from the perspective of which the likelihood of an anterior situation is assessed:
-
(i)
At the same time I wondered how she was going to manage this, for she must have put away four or five glasses of wine by now. (ICE-GB)
-
(i)
- 21.
See Boogaart (2007) for a discussion of the interpretation of past and perfect forms of epistemic modals in Dutch, a language in which modals have the complete range of morphological forms.
- 22.
See Michaelis (1998: 208–209) for a discussion of the different types of anteriority relation that the perfect infinitive can express in examples of this type.
- 23.
The conceptual pair homogeneous-heterogeneous adequately captures the potential effect of the progressive marker, which coerces Accomplishments into homogeneous situations for instance. In such a context, R is either simultaneous with M or posterior to M, as shown in the following examples:
- 24.
Verhulst (2012: 97–99) also mentions the case of hedged performatives. In such a context punctual situations (R) can be simultaneous with M, as in:
-
(i)
No that’s something we in England, in Britain I should say, are not particularly aware of, but a lot of British artists who are very well know on the Continent. (Verhulst 2012: 111)
-
(i)
- 25.
I am grateful to Liliane Haegeman for pointing out this example to me.
- 26.
Condoravdi (2002), Laca (2008), Abusch (2012), Thomas (2014) offer insightful discussions about the formal mechanisms that may explain the (constraints on the) available interpretations in sentences with specific modals followed by a perfect infinitive. The analyses are carried out within Kratzer’s (1981, 1991) model of modal meaning. Laca’s paper is a comparison between French and Spanish, in which a wider range of morphological forms are available than in English. Huddleston (1977) offers an interesting discussion of different types of examples (conditional sentences as well as non-conditional clauses) with ‘past tense transportation’ triggered by defective verbs (modals). His analysis is mainly focussed on conditional contexts (If you had tried harder, you could have come), but he also touches upon the impact of negation on ‘fulfillment’ of the complement clause in main clauses with modal verbs. (Ought(n’t) you to have told her?) (1977: 50–52)
- 27.
Kytö and Romaine observe that the perfect infinitive ‘does not seem to have developed until the Middle English period, and did not occur with great frequency until the fourteenth century.’ (Kytö and Romaine 2005: 4) ‘In Middle English the expression of irrealis rather than tense becomes the main function of the perfect infinitive because it is usually found in combinations with modal verbs, which are incapable of indicating temporal distinctions.’ (2005: 18). One might also want to investigate to what extent and at what point the perfect infinitive compensates the change in the meaning of the morphological marker for past time in modals.
- 28.
Generalized Conversational Implicature.
- 29.
As observed in footnote 15 (Chap. 2), one might want to argue whether the perfect marker illustrates lexically restricted saturation, as the perfect is, after all, a grammatical marker. The use of ‘lexical restricted saturation’ is inspired by the fact that we are talking here about a marker that comes with a restricted range of meanings, one of which is instantiated in context.
- 30.
Michaelis (1998: 209) likewise makes use of the concept of quantity-based inference to explain counterfactual meaning (her discussion is based on I could have been a contender. (Marlon Brando, On the Waterfront)): ‘if the speaker in fact was a contender in the past, it would be uninformative for him to assert merely that had the ability to compete in the past’.
- 31.
Laca (2008) likewise argues against an approach whereby counterfactuality is triggered by a past temporal ‘perspective’.
- 32.
An additional telling observation she makes is that have is not even required to establish counterfactual meaning:
-
(i)
I have spent the past half hour removing the blog comments of a spammer named Ed. He spams using Chinese characters! It is so irritating! … I should be sleeping now but I have to do something about that person. (BNC)
-
(ii)
We were supposed to have had/have a guest speaker at the last AGM but instead had to show the video on its own. (BNC) (Verhulst 2012: 139)
-
(i)
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Depraetere, I. (2017). The Meanings of have and the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface. In: Depraetere, I., Salkie, R. (eds) Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32247-6_16
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