Things may be more complex than they seemed at first
maydenison
A while back (March 28th, in fact) I spent a little time
examining
the claim that the modal verb
may
was encroaching on the territory of modal
might, and suggested that (insofar
as this encroachment was actually going on, which wasn't entirely
clear) it might have something to do with the perception that
may is more informal than
might.
Since then, Elizabeth Traugott has pointed me to David Denison's
article "Counterfactual
may have"
(in Gerritsen & Stein,
Internal
and external factors in syntactic change, Mouton de Gruyter,
1992), which makes it clear that things are a whole boatload more
complex than I'd first thought. There probably isn't just one
shift in usage going on; the shifts probably have different
motivations; and different people probably are moving in different
directions, in different constructions.
The larger lesson is that the details of linguistic variation -- what
forms are available, with what meanings, by whom, in what settings,
with what effects -- can be
VERY hard to discern indeed.
So, is
may expanding in
use? Many have claimed that things like
If he'd have released the ball a second
earlier..., he may have had a touchdown are evidence that it
is. But Denison suggests otherwise: in general, he sees a
contraction of
may, though
with increased specialization -- expansion in just a few contexts (like
the counterfactual). He looks at the factors that might have
favored the spread, a great many factors, but the bottom line is that
there are tugs in different directions. And for good
reasons. Let me speculate...
The alternation is between
may
(originally a present tense form) and
might
(originally a past tense form). So we start with closeness (in
time) with
may versus
distancing (in time) with
might.
The concomitant of this difference that pretty much everybody has
noticed is the greater tentativeness of
might: further off in time is
further off in certainty.
But there are other possibilities: greater subjectivity for
may, greater objectivity for
might (expressing belief in a
possibility vs. reporting the possibility); or greater social
closeness, more informality, for
may,
vs. greater social distance, more formality, for
might. There's more than one
way to extend the present-past distinction metaphorically or
metonymically.
Denison's 1992 article (primarily concerned with U.K. English) suspects
that counterfactual
may have
might have spread from the U.S. This is not an unreasonable
idea. Meanwhile, Denison has some evidence that some U.K.
speakers consider
may MORE
formal (or standard or correct) than
might,
probably as a result of "corrections" of root
may as a replacement for vernacular
can, as in
May/Can I have a cookie?
The landscape of variation we then see looks pretty lumpy, not unlike
what we see with the famous (morpho)phonological variable (ING), where
the same stuff bears very different social/discourse/personal meanings
in different contexts. Are you: Competent?
Educated? Cool and easy? Southern? Friendly?
Stupid? Upper class? Gay? Distant? Or what?
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 3, 2005 11:19 PM