Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

The Syntax of Modality in Tigrinya

This talk serves to descriptively and theoretically place Tigrinya (Ethiosemitic; Eritrea and Ethiopia; SOV) within the typological picture of how verbal modality is syntactically grammaticalized. We will show that in this language the epistemic-root distinction corresponds to a syntactic difference between auxiliaries and verbs. We will also provide evidence for a correspondence between the thematic structure of root modal verbs (transitive v. unaccusative) and the force of modality that it encodes (necessity or possibility). We provide a theoretical analysis in which the syntax of Tigrinya modals pivots between mono-clausal and bi-clausal structures and the latter pivot between Control and Expletive constructions.