{"pk":34901,"title":"The modalities of Newār mal","subtitle":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the interaction between the Newār versatile verb \nmal\n ‘search, need’ and the range of epistemic, deontic, and dynamic modalities outlined in Palmer 1986. According to Givón 2001, modality codes the speaker’s attitude toward a proposition.\n \nThe attitudinal thread running through the modal uses of \nmal\n is that of \nnecessity\n. With epistemic judgments, \nmal\n marks an inference as necessary, given the evidence at hand. In deontic directives, \nmal\n amounts to a command – a certain action or response on the part of the hearer is necessary. In deontic commissives the speaker finds it necessary to commit himself to a task. In volitives, the speaker’s need is to express a wish, a blessing, or a curse. In the dynamic modalities the necessity stems either from within the speaker (subject-oriented) or from external pressures that impinge upon him (circumstantial).\n \nThe evidential basis of a statement, whether eye witness or hearsay, is the modality that has the least to do with necessity, and the one to which mal has the least contribution to make. Thus \nmal\n is shown to have a wide range of interaction within the epistemic, deontic, and dynamic modalities, but in each interaction the contribution of \nmal\n highlights necessity as part of the speaker’s attitude to the proposition.","language":"en","license":null,"keywords":[{"word":"modality"},{"word":"Newar"},{"word":"Epistemic"},{"word":"deontic"},{"word":"dynamic"},{"word":"Necessity"}],"section":"Articles","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1z88v68x","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Austin","middle_name":"","last_name":"Hale","name_suffix":"","institution":"SIL Nepal","department":"None"}],"date_submitted":"2014-08-19T02:31:29Z","date_accepted":"2014-08-19T02:31:29Z","date_published":"2011-01-15T08:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/himalayanlinguistics/article/34901/galley/26018/download/"}]}