Less is more: possibility and necessity as centres of gravity in a usage-based classification of core modals in Polish

In this paper we present the results of an empirical study into the cognitive reality of existing classifications of modality using Polish data.

We analyzed random samples of 250 independent observations for the 7 most frequent modal words (móc ‘can’, można ‘it is possible’, musieć ‘must’, należy ‘it is necessary’, powinien ‘should’, trzeba ‘it is required’, wolno ‘it is allowed’), extracted from the National Corpus of Polish. Observations were annotated for modal type according to four different classifications of modality, as well as for morphological, syntactic and semantic properties using the Behavioral Profiling approach. Multiple correspondence analysis and (polytomous) regression models were used to determine how well modal type and usage align. These corpus-based findings were validated experimentally. In a forced choice task, ‘naive’ native speakers were exposed to definitions and prototypical examples of modal types or functions and then labeled a number of authentic corpus sentences accordingly. In the sorting task, naive native speakers sorted authentic corpus sentences into semantically coherent groups.

In this article we discuss the results of our empirical study as well as the issues involved in building usage-based accounts on traditional linguistic classifications.