Should a conditional marker arise … The diachronic development of conditional sollte in German

What it is about

The paper studies the German modal sollen (past subjunctive sollte) when it appears in the protasis of a conditional, where it no longer carries its ordinary deontic or evidential sense but marks conditionality. The data are hand-checked conditional clauses from a Middle High German corpus (428 clauses) and two New High German samples (186 and 195 clauses). The coded variables are the modal meaning, syndetic or asyndetic (with or without wenn), linkage level, and the tense and mood of the modal. The main finding is a steady narrowing: the past subjunctive becomes the only form for conditional sollte, and tense mismatch between protasis and apodosis rises from about 13% in Middle High German to about 70% in present-day German. The paper reads this as ongoing grammaticalization by upward reanalysis (Roberts and Roussou 2003) through Cinque's functional hierarchy, where the modal moves to a Mood-irrealis head and in verb-first conditionals is starting to act as a conditional marker.

Ideas

• I1. Rule-based classifier for English should: a sentence-initial should + subject + bare or finite verb, followed by a main clause with will/would/could, is a conditional protasis (Should he call, I will answer). Mark it as a conditional rather than a modal, with the rule that fired shown in the output.
• I2. Coding scheme from the paper as a test set: for each English should, record modal meaning (deontic, evidential, conditional), position (V1 or with if), and tense pattern. Measure the rule's precision and recall on hand-coded English sentences, with a negative control of plain deontic should ("You should go").
• I3. Trousdale's example "Should Hillary wins" (finite verb after conditional should) shows the rule needs to accept a finite verb as well as a bare infinitive. Write both forms into the test set.

For Mova

The chapters are 24. Coordination and subordination (conditional clauses), 21. The simple clause (inverted V1 protases), 32. Politeness and hedging (the epistemic and evidential uses of should) and 27. Negation. The code is en/src/tag.rs and en/src/udreg.rs (modal and mood features in the tagger), with the classifier best placed in prag next to the modal and hedge code. The paper is about German, so its data give no English numbers; the measures are the rule's precision and recall on an English should test set, and the negative-control result on plain deontic uses.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.599

@article{breitbarth2019should,
  title = {{Should a conditional marker arise … The diachronic development of conditional sollte in German}},
  author = {Breitbarth, Anne},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.599},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.599}
}

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39. How to cite this article: Breitbarth, Anne. 2019. Should a conditional marker arise … The diachronic development of conditional sollte in German. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4(1): 21. 1–23, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.599 ↗
40. Submitted: 25 December 2017 find
41. Accepted: 12 October 2018 find
42. Published: 01 February 2019 find
43. Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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