Agan (to) infinitive with negation

When HERMERÉN(1979: 161) acknowledges that “modals in relation to negation are an important aspect of modal meaning,” it comes as no surprise that the question of the co-occurrence of negation with modality has been looked into from various angles. LYONS(1977: 768—769) advances the need to distinguish between the negation of modality and the negation of the proposition, which follows a modal marker.⁷This topic has become a recurrent one as picked up, for example, by JACOBSSON (1979) who, while analyzing the contemporary trends in the usage of the necessity modals, discusses modal negation and main verb negation. Also PALMER(1979: 26) speaks correspondingly of “the negation of the modality and the negation of the event” as in:

(3.1.20) You mustn’t take him too seriously.

(3.1.21) You needn’t take him too seriously.

(sentences from PALMER 1979: 26) Even though both (3.1.20) and (3.1.21) contain modal and negation markers, in (3.1.20) it is the event that is under negation whereas in (3.1.21) it is the modality of necessity that falls within the scope of negation. Thus, the appropriate paraphrases of (3.1.20) and (3.1.21) respectively are the following:

(3.1.22) It is necessary for you not to take him seriously.

(3.1.23) It is not necessary for you to take him seriously.

(For more considerations of the irregularities and gaps in the system of modal markers in relation to negation cross-linguistically, see PALMER 1995, 1997;DE

HAAN 1997 and VAN DER AUWERA 2001).

As regards the negative examples of agan (to) infinitive, I have assembled the corpus data in Table 7. The negative forms, while in the minority when it comes to the total number of the occurrences of the construction, i.e. 34,9 per cent, appear in half of the examples of agan (to) infinitive when the meaning at issue

7JOOS (1964), JAKOBSON (1971), BOUMA(1975), and PALMER (1979) use the term “event”

instead of “proposition”.

is deontic necessity. Note that negation does not find its way to agan to geldanne. Nor does it to the agan to habenne instances which are included among the deontic necessity examples in Table 7. Among the 6 instances of agan to habenne, 5 are engendered in affirmative clauses, one occurs in an interrogative clause. Once we set aside agan to habenne, as TRAUGOTT and DASHER(2005) suggest that it be done, we are left with the 28 deontic necessity examples out of which 17 are negative. It follows then that agan with the meaning of deontic necessity sees a significant increase in the number of negative clauses. I have checked whether there is any correlation between the affirmative/negative type of a clause and the force of the necessity of agan. In Table 8 the cases of strong and weak deontic necessity have been cast against the clause types. It turns out that in the case of both affirmative and negative clauses, the strong necessity instances constitute slightly less than half of all the examples. There is no justification for the statement that stronger necessity of agan (to) infinitive is to be linked with the increase in the number of negative sentences. Possibly, no such correlation can be established due to insufficient data in Old English. Further investigation into agan in Middle English could shed some more light on the issue. That an overall inclination of the negative contexts to exhibit stronger modality can be expected finds support in NAGLE’S

(1989: 96) interesting cross-linguistic observation which posits that

we might speculate that the meanings of the marginal modals [namely dare and need in Present-Day English] in negatives and questions are somehow ‘more’ modal than in affirmatives [...]. Evidence for the [...]

notion, at least as regards negatives, is found in many Indo-European languages that have morphological subjunctive verb tenses. In both modern French and Old English, for example, the morphological subjunctive appears in complement clauses whose higher sentence

Clause type Table 7.Distribution of clause types with agan (to) infinitive

contains a semantically negative verb such as doubt or negated verbs of thinking, believing, etc., or where the meaning contained in the complement clause is negative as in OE sentences [...] from TRAUGOTT

1972: 101:

(3.1.24) ic wene ðætte noht monige begiodan Humber næren

‘I think that not many beyond the Humber not were’.

(subj.).

CP. 3. 16 (complement negative)

(3.1.25) ðeh ne geortriewe ic na Gode ðæt he us ne mæge (subj.) gescildan.

‘although I shall not distrust God (so much as to think) he can not shield us’. (higher sentence negative) (NAGLE 1989:

96—97)

I have included some of those negative instances while illustrating the cline of the deontic necessity of agan as a holistic attitude seems the most feasible in this case. It is a fair generalization which makes it clear that both affirmative and negative constructions serve to express different degrees of deontic necessity and subjectivity. Nevertheless, the fact that the negative examples vary in the degree of necessity makes it no mean task to analyze these examples in terms of the scope of negation. Consider (3.1.14) and (3.1.15) again, where the intensity of the necessity makes the meanings of those examples approximate to the sense of lack of permission, (for the meanings of strong necessity-not-to and prohibition being closely intertwined in the case of PDE mustn’t, see COATES 1983: 39). These cases, it seems to me, are best treated as ones where it is the proposition that is negated. Thus in (3.1.14) it is a deontic necessity not to stay or say mass, etc. that is imposed on the priests and, analogically, in (3.1.15) we find out about a necessity for a Welshman not to go England. Logically, strong necessity-not-to is equal to prohibition, which accounts for the availability of a prohibition reading in the case of both (3.1.14) and (3.1.15) (see also 3.4.3 for the equivalence of the notions of necessary-not and not-possible in the sense of LYONS (1977) and 3.4.4 for the inference of necessity-not-to from prohibition in the case of mot). Conversely,

Necessity type Clause type

Strong necessity Weak necessity Total

Negative clauses 7 10 17

Affirmative clauses 3 8 11

Total 10 18 28

Table 8.Distribution of strong/weak necessity with agan (to) infinitive

the negative instances of weaker necessity such as (3.1.17) require a different interpretation. The force of necessity of agan in (3.1.17) brings the meaning of the verb close to that of PDE should or ought to. The peculiarity of these two PDE modals, when they are used with non-epistemic meanings, is that they accept both kinds of negation, which leaves the meaning, broadly speaking, intact. In COATES’S (1983: 239) assessment, the special compatibility of should and ought with negation of both modality and proposition, has to do with the merger-like character of the non-epistemic and epistemic meanings of the respective verbs. Opinions of other linguists, with the notable exception of HALLIDAY (1970), who acknowledges only proposition negation with should, converge in this respect in that the following sentence:

(3.1.26) They [beggars — J.N.] shouldn’t be allowed to go about like that. (sentence from COATES 1983: 63)

can be paraphrased as either (3.1.27) or (3.1.28) (cf. EHRMAN1966; HERMERÉN

1979):

(3.1.27) It is not advisable/appropriate that they be allowed...

(3.1.28) It is advisable/appropriate that they not be allowed...

In an attempt to account for this phenomenon, HORN (1989: 342) constructs a metascale of deontic necessity which indicates the increasing force of necessity.⁸ The bottom of the scale is occupied by a weak force of permission, say, that of PDE can or may, the center of the scale is associated with the necessity of should and ought and the strong necessity of must, have to and need belongs in the top of the scale. If negation of modality is applied to these modals, a reverse scale is arrived at. Negation of permission yields a strong force of prohibition, strong necessity, when negated, results in a weak force of no-necessity-to, while negation of the necessity of should/ought leaves the necessity unaffected so it remains the intermediate point on the negative metascale as well. The force of weaker necessity, that of should and ought, stays constant regardless of whether the necessity is negated or not, and, what is more, it also remains the same if the proposition following the necessity is under negation rather than the necessity itself. It then seems plausible to argue that the necessity of agan in (3.1.17) approaches the middle point on the metascale thereby making agan responsive to either modality negation or proposition negation without impinging on the meaning of the verb. It might also be added that the position of the negative particle is no clue that might

8DEHAAN’S(1997) continuum of deontic modality, which is presented in 2.3, is a recasting of HORN’S(1989) notion of the metascale.

hint at the type of negation which agan takes in a particular example.

Invariably, the negative particle ne is attached to agan, cumulatively yielding forms like nah, naht, nage, etc. (cf. WARNER1993: 150—151). The same trend perseveres in Present-Day English in that not is contracted with or follows the modals irrespective of what type of negation is at issue (cf., for instance, PALMER 2003).