Hello again all! I just wanted to send out a huge thank you to everyone who participated in/shared/suffered through my experimental surveys a couple weeks ago. Now that I've crunched the numbers, I can give a quick overview of what we were after.
If you took the surveys, you heard a particularly velvety baritone (ok, not velvety. And probably more of a bass...) saying sentences with combinations like might could and might would. There were some that had not in different locations (e.g. after might, after could, after both), have in various places (same), and also contracted n't and 've in various places (same). Some of these probably sounded very natural and others very unnatural. This, of course, is based on whether or not you actually use these combinations naturally or are around people that use these combinations naturally. Phrases like might could are called 'double modals'. A modal is a verb that indicates the possibility, likelihood, obligation, or ability from the speaker's perspective of the action that follows. For example, I might go vs. I will go. Might and will are both modals, and you see how they affect the following action. However, when there are two (or more!) modals, things get tricky. See, some varieties of English don't allow more than one modal. Judging by the ratings, a lot of you that took the survey didn't like them. That just means that they aren't part of your grammar (the system of rules/tendencies of the language that you speak). Others liked certain combinations fine, but others weren't so good. For example, I might could've gone is perfectly acceptable to many of the double modal speakers, but I might've could gone was not acceptable. What is incredibly interesting is that the non-double modal speakers also had some intuition about this. Even though their grammar doesn't permit double modals, they knew/know that the 've can attach more easily to the second modal rather than the first, even if they don't use/accept the combination itself. Cool, huh? This means that there are different systems of English (pretty cool in and of itself) yet speakers have some intuitions (because the varieties are still a type of English). Even cooler, right?
The main point of our work was to see where the negation would go, where the have would go, and others to move toward understanding the structure of the double modals. From this, we can test whether both modals are functioning as verbs or not (spoiler alert: it appears to be no!). This means that one of them looks like a verb, sounds like a verb, but isn't a verb. Our initial finding is that the second modal is an actual modal, but the first is doing some thing else... Check back soon to hear more!
Thanks again for all the help!
