"I'd rather walk on my lips than say anything negative about someone." A good philosophy to live by and a cool thing to say.
"It's as fun as all get-out." One of my professors says this quite often.
"That woman drives me redneck crazy!" This was said in earnest, not as a joke. Proof that I've moved to Texas. QED.
"That might could work." I have a friend who uses the "might could" construction in most of our conversations. She cannot say either "might" or "could" alone in a sentence like that. For the linguists out there, she's using two modal/auxiliary verbs. The best part is that when the sentence is negated, it goes like this:
"She might not could go there."
See? The negative marker goes BETWEEN the modals.
(This is where things get nerdy.) Now, even though some of the more complex discussions of syntactic theory are hard to test scientifically, I currently believe that snytactic theory helps us to understand the psycholinguistic processes that produce language. There are lots of different models, but the one I have studied most (and thus have the most evidence for) is Chomsky's binary-branching tree model.
For the non-linguists, let it suffice to say that according to this theory, language is hierarchical, and certain structures must precede or follow certain other structures in order to form grammatical sentences. I'm not explaining this well. Hmm. Well, here's some confusing tree sketches that probably won't clear anything up:
After perusing my syntax textbooks, searching on google scholar, and referring to my library of theoretical syntax articles, I ended up drawing syntactic trees and considering the possible category of "might" and "could" for an embarrassing amount of time. I have come up with this temporary solution:
To my linguist friends out there, what have you to say about this? (Even if you don't like transformation theory and binary-branching trees.) Please provide input!
To my non-linguist friends, let me know if you guys are interested in me explaining my branch of syntax theory (pun intended). Maybe I could write up an intro explanation for this blog sometime, if people wish.
Regardless, there will probably be more trees in the future. Syntax trees are fun as all get-out!
Regardless, there will probably be more trees in the future. Syntax trees are fun as all get-out!
There's a LOT of intra-speaker variation in this construction. My friend Christine is from the Midwest and she has "might could" in her dialect, but she doesn't like it with negation or inversion. As for ellipsis, the fourth of the NICE properties of auxiliaries (contraction doesn't matter): according to her, the sentence "John might could leave early, and Jill might, too" means "Jill might [leave early], too" not "Jill might [could leave early]".
ReplyDeleteAs for the constituent structure tree, I would put the first modal in I (LFG, my new favorite framework,'s version of T) and the second in a V position (in LFG, there are no intermediate phrase positions, so this is really the only option). This would easily predict your negation data--but I'm not sure what to say about ellipsis, and Christine was pretty unsure about the sentence, so more context/data would be necessary before developing a full-blown analysis.
Putting "could" in v would get this VPE data right, but then you'd basically be doing what a lot of Minimalists do in not-very-good analyses of things, which is put the stuff you don't know what to do with in v (plus, my understanding is that v is supposed to be reserved for more causative-y things). Creating a new "MightP" or "CouldP" is just silly, as I think you noted in your notes, and totally language specific--if you really want to go that route, check out Cinque's stuff. Cinque came up with a universal ordering of null functional heads between C and V, where he also enumerated all the null functional heads that he thinks are allowable cross-linguistically (though I'm sure you know that, since you're more fluent in Minimalism than me!). I don't really know what the best way to do this in transformational grammar would be, since none of those approaches is particularly appealing to me. Of course, that's not MY problem ;)
If you want to find out more about this construction, ask native speakers (since you seem to be surrounded by them) about which modals are allowed in each of the two positions and what happens under inversion and ellipsis. That might point you in the right direction. (And share it, since I'm curious too!)
The "might could" dilemna is all about the Southerner who wants to keep his options open. This might could work means...maybe it will, maybe it won't, but I am not responsible either way. Just like "we might could do lunch" means I'll have lunch with you unless something better comes up. :) "I do declare" these Southerners have a language all their own....ya'll come back now...ya hear?
ReplyDeleteUm... So does "might could" mean the same thing as "probably could"?
ReplyDeleteSo the sentence "This might not could work" would translate to "This probably could not work"?
Syntax trees might could grow on me with more comics like those.
ReplyDelete