TY - BOOK ID - 34688244 TI - Norwegian Modals PY - 2011 VL - 74 SN - 9783110179965 3110179962 3110899639 PB - De Gruyter DB - UniCat KW - Norwegian language KW - Germanic languages KW - Verb. KW - Modality. KW - Grammar KW - Teutonic languages KW - Indo-European languages KW - Bokmål KW - Dano-Norwegian language KW - Norwegian language (Bokmål) KW - Norwegian language (Riksmål) KW - Riksmål KW - Scandinavian languages KW - Norwegian language - Verb. KW - Norwegian language - Modality. KW - Germanic languages - Modality. KW - Modal verbs. KW - Norwegian language. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:34688244 AB - Norwegian Modals is a detailed description of the syntactic and semantic properties of modals in Norwegian. Modal verbs in Mainland Scandinavian languages have received much less attention than their English and German counterparts, hence this book seizes the opportunity to present a range of new data and generalizations relevant for the study of Scandinavian languages, but also for the study of modality in Germanic and other languages. The book critically evaluates a range of proposals from the modality literature, focusing on the Theta-properties and the scopal properties of Modals in Germanic languages, and concludes that none of these previous proposals are able to account for the syntax of modals in Norwegian. The Theta-properties of modals are shown to depend on the construction in which the modal occurs, hence neither a raising analysis, a control analysis, nor a raising-versus-control analysis in fact suffices to exhaust these properties of Norwegian modals. The interplay of modals with tense and aspect is likewise thoroughly investigated, presenting a range of data revealing that existing universalist proposals are insufficient to account for even quite regular patterns. Instead, a new analysis is presented, building on a new compositional tense system which exploits aspectual features of predicates and selectional preferences of modal classes. ER -