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Two rules from different grammatical models supposedly disallow the construction. Proponents of
Phrase structure grammar see the surface clause as allowing only one modal verb, while main verb analysis would dictate that modal verbs occur in
finite forms.
(citing Di Paolo).
That (and much else) got
scrambled 53 weeks later, by some IP who didn't know what they were doing. The result makes no sense to me. Like so much crap in Wikipedia, it lived on.
Here's what Di Paolo writes:
In general, there have been two main approaches for ruling out such sequences of modals [as in "I could must do that"]: the phrase-structure (P-S) rule approach advocated by proponents of the Aux analysis which relies on P-S rules containing only one modal per surface clause (e.g., Chomsky 1957; Akmajian, Steele and Wasow 1979); and the subcategorization approach, proposed by advocates of the Main Verb analysis, which assumes that modals are finite forms and are subcategorized for stem forms (e.g., Baker 1981; Gazdar, Pullum and Sag 1982).
Here you'll find a bulky and lovingly crafted footnote that, I'm pretty sure, is about the not-so-obviously-major question of whether or not one should type a d in "I didn't used to watch Youtube". (I'm not entirely confident: I neither created it nor have edited it, and am not sure how its ellipses are intended to be understood.)
That's a question about lexical use(d), not about auxiliary (and perhaps modal auxiliary) use(d) (using which, one would say "I used not to watch Youtube" or "I usedn't to watch Youtube"). But this article is about modal auxiliary verbs, not their lexical homonyms, and therefore I removed this footnote in the following edit. Maybe it belongs in some other article.
(In conversational English, I suspect that "I never used to watch Youtube" would be more likely than anything above, but I can't immediately produce evidence supporting this belief.) --
Hoary (
talk)
05:00, 15 December 2023 (UTC)reply
Use(d (to)): modal or not?
Use /jus/ is these days a lexical verb, more often than not. But it used not only to be. It used to be an auxiliary verb too, usedn't it? (Yes, it used to.) And for some speakers, it still is.
Now, the question is of whether to treat it as a modal auxiliary verb, or as just a (non-modal) auxiliary verb. Two authorities that treat it as a modal:
Warner, Anthony R. (1993). English Auxiliaries: Structure and History. Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ISBN978-0-521-30284-5.
Three that do not:
Aarts, Bas (2011). Oxford Modern English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ISBN978-0-19-953319-0.
Wikipedia shouldn't pretend that there's agreement. But it also shouldn't treat use as a modal in this article and as a non-modal in the article
English auxiliary verbs -- which is what it does now.
Plan: A week from now, if nobody objects, I'll:
remove most of the material in this article about use;
in this article, acknowledge that a "modal auxiliary verb" status of use has its supporters;
in this article, point to the discussion of use in the other article;
paste into the other article the material about use from this article (acknowledging its source);
edit the material in that article about use (cutting duplication, etc);
make sure that in that article is an acknowledgement that a "modal auxiliary verb" status of use has its supporters.
Quirk et al. admit that it is not semantically modal, "in formal terms, however, it fits the marginal modal category." If modality is a semantic concept, then this appears simply to be sloppy terminology. I think your plan is sound.--
Brett (
talk)
14:40, 17 December 2023 (UTC)reply
Brett, I wrote the lengthy question cum tentative announcement above while 80% asleep, and wake to find that it's about as prolix and incoherent as would be expected. Well done on your success in making sense of it. Yes, after considering the syntax of use, Huddleston similarly adds "It is also semantically quite distinct from the modal auxiliaries: the meaning it expresses is aspectual, not modal." But if we were using semantic criteria, we'd have considerable trouble (at best) with need and would have to reject dare. --
Hoary (
talk)
21:46, 17 December 2023 (UTC)reply
Brett, for clarity, I should have titled this "Use(d (to)): modal auxiliary verb or not?" Because I think that expression of modality as a criterion for modal auxiliary verbs is akin to reference to a thing as a criterion for nouns. But FWIW in my (hoary?) idiolect, the parental complaint Need you make so much noise? is indistinguishable from Must you make so much noise?: dynamic modality. And the impatient You needn't make such an issue of it has some similarity to You shouldn't make such an issue of it: deontic modality. --
Hoary (
talk)
21:56, 18 December 2023 (UTC)reply
There is also a dialect verb, nearly obsolete but sometimes heard in
Appalachia and the
Deep South of the
United States: darest, which means "dare not", as in "You darest do that."
-- with no reference. Despite their later block, the writer
seems to have been serious. But as there's little hope that they'll reappear and source this claim, I'm about to delete it. Anyone is free to readd it, but with a source. --
Hoary (
talk)
07:20, 19 December 2023 (UTC)reply
Change of referencing style
I've offered to help Hoary with converting the references in this article to use {{sfn}} style short form refs, rather tha the current use of refnames and {{rp}} trmplates. If no-one objects I'll start the work tomorrow. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«
@» °
∆t°
12:35, 27 December 2023 (UTC)reply
Hoary is looking to do a lot of work on the article and is looking to tidy how references look in the article. Currently there's one that looks like this in the middle of the text, "[4]: 128–131, 141–143 [8]: 46 [1]: 111–114 [2]: 301–302, 304–305". Once converted that will becomes"[4][8][1][2]", with the pages appearing in the reference section instead. The once Hoary's work is complete this would be reduced to just "[4]" using {{sfnm}}, with all the details appear to together in the reflist. The point is to have a better flow of text, while maintaining all the details for verification. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«
@» °
∆t°
17:54, 27 December 2023 (UTC)reply
Yes,
Brett, I can confirm what
ActivelyDisinterested says. Incidentally, I once strongly disliked the use in articles of {{sfn}}, and for what I still think were good reasons; but these reasons have evaporated (thanks to, I suppose, some change to Mediawiki). --
Hoary (
talk)
22:44, 27 December 2023 (UTC)reply
Hoary all the references have been converted to sfnp templates. When you've completed the overhaul of the article ping me if you still want any multiple references converted to sfnpm. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«
@» °
∆t°
16:51, 2 January 2024 (UTC)reply