Multiple Modals

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

There’s something we might could talk about, Martha.

We might could?

Yeah. Multiple modals.

Multiple modals.

Do you know what a modal is?

That’s what you put on pi when you…

Oh, yeah. Pi out of modal.

Right? No?

No, no. In English, a modal is something like might or should or could, right?

Yeah.

These are words that kind of suggest the distance between possible and likely.

To be a little more technical about it, they work with verbs and auxiliary verbs to help distinguish the mood of the verb, right?

And so we say, I might go to the store, which suggests the possibility but not the certainty that I might go to the store, right?

I should wear a sweater today is different than I might wear a sweater today, right?

Correct.

Well, in this country and frankly in the north of England and northern Ireland and parts of Scotland, they use two or more of these modals together.

And this is really interesting. It’s a common feature in American Southern speech.

A lot of the places where we’re on the air use this language.

I know that we’ve received emails about this and we hear it in our callers’ voices.

And it’s wonderful to hear because it’s so characteristic.

So these are the folks, when I say something like, I thought y’all may would have some more of them.

Whoa.

It makes perfect sense.

Right.

I thought y’all may, would have had some more of them means in a complicated way that there was a pretty good chance that this person thought there might be more of whatever it was they were looking for.

May, would have.

Yeah.

And those are called multiple modals.

And the reason this is on my mind is because I went to the American Dialect Society Conference in Pittsburgh in January.

And Michael Montgomery, who was one of the editors of the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, brilliant man, is working on a new project.

He’s working with a fellow named Paul Reed, and they’ve made a database of all of these written uses of multiple modals.

It is very distinctive Southern American speech.

And so they’ve analyzed them and got kind of geeky about it and, you know, marked them up linguistically.

They’re linguists.

Marked them up linguistically.

But it’s really wonderful stuff.

And I’ll link to this so that you can see that this is, as they put it, this is grammatically correct English within that dialect.

It’s not wrong.

It is perfectly grammatical because it makes sense and there are some rules there.

But anyway, wonderful stuff.

That’s Michael Montgomery and Paul Reed at the University of South Carolina.

We’ll talk a little bit more about this probably in future shows.

I know that we’ve had some questions about this, but it’s just a great way to distinguish kind of one of the dialect regions of the United States.

Want to talk about language?

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