Pure Possibility and Pure Necessity Modals in Paciran Javanese

This paper provides a first complete description of pure possibility and pure necessity modals in the Paciran dialect of Javanese, based on a wide variety of fieldwork tools such as elicitation, storyboards (www.storyboards.org), interviews, and a questionnaire on modality that I designed. To best understand their semantics, I present a theoretically informed approach to describing modality, focusing on both modal force and modal flavor. I then present a formal semantic analysis of these modals in Paciran Javanese within the standard Kratzerian theory, explicitly showing how modals with fixed flavor and fixed force can be captured.