Modality (review)

Paul Portner’s Modality is the first volume of Oxford’s new ‘Surveys in semantics and pragmatics’ series, which is designed to provide ‘both a valuable resource for instruction and reference and a state-of-the-art perspective on contemporary semantic and pragmatic theory from the experts shaping the field’ (xi). And Modality lives up to this billing. It serves as an introduction, giving an overview of the main theories of modality, from modal logic, through Angelika Kratzer’s seminal work (Kratzer 1981, 1991), to more recent approaches. Here P manages to explain both the forest and the trees, illuminating, for each theory, both its intuitive appeal and its formal details. But the book is also a valuable reference for experts. It summarizes major areas of active debates (e.g. truth-conditional status of epistemic modality), presents novel issues and challenges to current theories (e.g. issues of graded modality), and offers new solutions and directions, which will certainly inspire future research.

Modality is organized into five chapters. Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (1–8), introduces the notion of modality and demonstrates its ubiquity by providing a list of modal expressions. P shows that modality is found across lexical categories, beyond modal auxiliaries and adverbs—on which the book focuses—but also in aspects, tenses, conditionals, and even covertly.

Ch. 2 provides an introduction to ‘Modal logic’ (9–46). As P points out, a basic understanding of modal logic is important for linguists working on modality, since this is where the first formal accounts were developed. In this chapter, P presents and motivates the building blocks of the quantification over possible-worlds framework. This introduction is limited, rightly so, given the focus of the book, and because there are many other excellent introductions to modal logic (e.g. Hughes & Cresswell 1996).

Ch. 3, ‘Major linguistic theories of modality’ (47–132), presents three main theories of modality: (i) Kratzer’s theory, which is couched in the possible-worlds framework inherited from modal logic and has become the ‘standard’ theory (Section 3.1), (ii) theories of epistemic modality within dynamic semantics (Section 3.2), and (iii) accounts of modality from functional and cognitive linguistics (Section 3.3). The discussion of Kratzer’s theory in Section 3.1 alone makes reading Modality worthwhile. First, the presentation of her theory is extremely clear and should prove very useful to newcomers to modality. It highlights the insights, motivations, and empirical coverage of the theory, while carefully explaining its formal details and spelling out its underlying assumptions. Second, this section contains an important breakthrough for the semantics of graded modality, which will undoubtedly instigate new and exciting research on the topic. As P shows, Kratzer’s system derives graded notions of modality (e.g. better possibility), but it does so in a noncompositional way. P suggests that the key to a compositional solution is to relate grades of modal force to the general theory of gradable expressions, and points to possible ways in which this could be implemented.

Ch. 4, ‘Sentential modality’ (133–220), discusses theoretical and empirical issues specific to the semantics of the three main subtypes of modality: (i) epistemic modals, which express possibilities and necessities given what is known; (ii) priority modals, which include deontic, bouletic, and teleological modals—these express possibilities and necessities given certain laws, desires, and goals, respectively; and (iii) dynamic modals, which include ability, volitional, and quantificational modals. Such issues taken together present important challenges to general accounts of modality; for these P suggests a series of solutions that exploit performative aspects of modality.

Ch. 5, ‘Modality and other intensional categories’ (221–66), discusses the interaction of modality and tense, looking both at the temporal interpretation of modals and at the intensional component of certain tenses—the association between past tense and counterfactuality as well as between the present and genericity—and the question of whether the future should be thought of as a tense or a modal. It briefly introduces the modality involved in aspectual operators (such as the progressive and the perfect...