Why French modal verbs are not polysemous, and other considerations on conceptual and procedural meanings

Abstract

This article aims at determining the type of ambiguity manifested by modal verbs, focusing on French. Modal verbs are often described as polysemous since they seem to encode a fixed number of possible meanings. Options of offer are the following: (i) that modal verbs are indeed polysemous according to a technical notion of polysemy, i.e. they encode a limited set of clear-cut modal meanings; (ii) that they are a mixture of polysemy and underspecification, that is, each meaning selected in the lexicon may undergo further adjustment; (iii) that modal verbs are not conceptual but rather procedural, i.e., they encode instructions based on their grammatical dimension (they take scope over propositions which they modify); (iv) they have a vague meaning; or (v) they are simply conceptual as any other full verb is and, as most conceptual expressions, they are underspecified and get a precise meaning in context through pragmatic enrichment. Our assumption is the latter, however with a nuance regarding epistemic necessity with devoir (must) following experimental results by Barbet (2013). We take the opportunity of this issue to go at large on conceptual and procedural meanings in the first part of the paper.