"Would Have Become": Empty or Modal WILL

Author(s): Rodney Huddleston

Source: Journal of Linguistics , Sep., 1979, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Sep., 1979), pp. 335-340
Published by: Cambridge University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4175503

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J. Linguistics 15 (I979) 203-395 Printed in Great Britain

Would have become: empty or modal WILL

RODNEY HUDDLESTON

University of Queensland

(Received 2o December 1978)

In an earlier paper (Huddleston, 1977) I analysed the would of

(i) If he had stayed in the army, he would have become a colonel

as the unreal mood form of an epistemic modal verb WILL that figures in the
underlying syntactic representation and falls within the semantic scope of a past
element realized by HAVE. Palmer (1978) criticizes this analysis, claiming that
WILL iS 'obviously' semantically empty, a mere 'dummy' inserted to carry the
mark of unreality - that would have become is 'the Unreal and Past form of
BECOME'. In this reply I seek to establish that the WILL of (I) is not empty by
demonstrating its semantic continuity with uncontroversially meaningful uses of
WILL, and to answer the specific objections that Palmer makes to my own analysis.
Consider first real conditions, such as

(2) If he joins the army, he will become a colonel.

This, like the simple sentence He will become a colonel, contains what Palmer
regards as a 'futurity' use of WILL, with a 'very different meaning' from that of a
'true epistemic' WILL in, say, They'll be on holiday now. It seems to me, however,
that Palmer's sharp distinction between futurity and epistemic WILL is based on
an incorrect semantic analysis of the latter. He interprets it as expressing prob-
ability, placing it on an epistemic scale in between the MAY of possibility and the
MUST of certainty. Futurity WILL involves for him no epistemic qualification at
all, so that It will rain soon is epistemically stronger than It must surely rain soon,
whereas They will be on holiday now, expressing probability, is epistemically
weaker than They must be on holiday now, which expresses certainty - hence
two distinct meanings of WILL. I would dispute, however, that WILL with a non-
future complement expresses mere probability. They will be on holiday now does
not have at all the same meaning as It is probable that they are on holiday now:
I could continue the latter with but it's just possible that they don't start till next
week, whereas adding this to They'll be on holiday now would be semantically
inconsistent. The idea that WILL expresses probability doubtless arises from the
fact that it is often used in situations when our evidence for the factuality of the
complement does not provide strict 'epistemic warrant' (to use Lyons' felicitous

0022-2267/79/0015-0035$00.35 ? 1979 Cambridge University Press

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 RODNEY HUDDLESTON

phrase (1977: 8o8)) for anything stronger than a 'prob

establish that WILL MEANS 'it is probable that': it sim
general fact that we often use epistemically stronger utterances than we have
strict warrant for. Palmer excludes from his epistemic category the WILL of Bill is
John's father and John is Tom's father, so Bill will be Tom's grandfather (1974:
I13), where a 'probable' paraphrase would clearly be rejected. The epistemic
warrant is greater here than in They will be on holiday now, but it does not follow
that WILL has a different meaning. The strength of the evidence will vary on a
continuum: I see no reason for claiming that the language 'semanticizes' a
distinction between 'probable' and (say) 'irrefutable' within the meaning of WIL
We find the same variation in the use of MUST: compare 7ohn must be a fast reader
said of someone who has read Middlemarch from cover to cover in a single
evening, and John must have overslept, said when John has failed to turn up for an
8 a.m. rendezvous. If pressed, the speaker would quite likely admit in the latter
case that there could be other possible reasons for John's failure to turn up, but
again this does not establish that MUST can mean '(very) probably': the admission
would simply imply that he had been speaking fairly loosely, that he had not had
strict epistemic warrant for his MUST.
The case against saying that WILL has a meaning equivalent to 'probably' is
strengthened by a consideration of modal adverbs. Both He will have received it
yesterday (Palmer's epistemic WILL) and He will receive it tomorrow (his futurity
WILL) allow qualification by the full range of epistemic adverbs: possibly, perhaps,
probably, surely, certainly, etc. If the two WILL'S differed semantically in the way
Palmer claims, they would not be expected to behave identically in this regard.
Moreover, the doubly modalized He will certainly have received it yesterday does
not mean either 'It is probable that it is certain that he received it yesterday' or
'It is certain that it is probable that he received it yesterday' - it involves a
stronger epistemic commitment than either of these.
A better account of the meaning of WILL in They will be on holiday, it seems to
me, is to say that it serves to take 'their being on holiday' out of the realm of
present factuality: it is predictive in the sense that it is only in the future that the
factuality can be established. In saying They are on holiday I am implicitly
claiming to have sufficient evidence for an epistemically unqualified assertion; in
saying They will be on holiday I am not claiming such direct knowledge. Such an
account enables us to relate Palmer's two WILL'S for It arrives this evening
likewise involves a stronger epistemic commitment than It will arrive this
evening: the former treats the factuality as in effect already guaranteed in the
present. In talking of WILL as expressing predictive epistemic modality, I do not
wish to imply that it always qualifies the performative component of the utterance
- like the other epistemic modals it can be used 'objectively' as well as 'subjective-
ly' (see Lyons, 1977: Ch. I7, for this important distinction, which will concern us
again below). In either case it removes the factuality from the deictic here-and-

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 Would have become: EMPTY OR MODAL 'WILL'?

now, and it is this aspect of its meaning that makes it so appropriate for use in
unreal conditions.
The unreal counterpart of (2) is

(3) If he joined the army, he would become a colonel.

The temporal relations are here exactly the same as in (2). Since non-past (3), as
well as past (i), unreal conditions require that the finite verb of the apodosis be
drawn from the set CAN, DARE, MAY, MUST, NEED, OUGHT (for some speakers only),
SHALL (with Ist Person subject), WILL, Palmer would presumably handle the
WILL of (3) as empty too. But I do not see how this analysis can be sustained in
the light of the above discussion of the meaning of WILL. It denies that the WILL
of (3) is the same as that of (2), which no one would claim to be empty; it treats
would become as the unreal counterpart of becomes rather than will become. That
this is semantically unsatisfactory is evident from such a set of examples as

(4) If you behave like that tomorrow, you (i) I } your pocket money.
L (ii) losef
f (i) would lose] your pocket
(5) If you behaved like that tomorrow, you l(ii) *lost money.

The difference between (4i) and (4ii) is like that between the non-conditional
examples discussed above. The absence of predictive modality in (4ii) makes the
threat that it would typically be used to make somewhat more forceful than is the
case with (4i): the occurrence of the event under the stated condition is guaranteed
in the here-and-now. (5i) clearly corresponds to (4i) rather than (4ii), and this is
the correspondence that is captured by an analysis where it contains the WILL of
(4i). The constraint which excludes (5ii) is not semantically necessary, but nor is
it arbitrary. The unreal mood and predictive epistemic modality in (5i) reinforce
each other in removing the contingent loss of pocket money from the immediacy
of the real world here-and-now, and there is no necessary reason why the
grammar should not allow the mood to do this without the reinforcement of the
modality. But this is very different from saying that there simply is no semantic
modality in (5i). Why should the meaning of modal WILL exclude its use in
unreal conditionals?
(i) differs from (3) in having a past in both protasis and apodosis. But I see no
reason for distinguishing their WILL'S: neither is empty - the difference is simply
that in (I) WILL falls within the scope of the past.
Let me turn now to the arguments Palmer advances against my own analysis.
First, it allegedly suggests that 'epistemicity is an essential element of an Unreal
apodosis'. In a sentence like [If I had had time] I could have got the money easily
enough, CAN iS used in its 'root' rather than epistemic sense. 'To be at all con-
sistent', therefore, I would have to have a WILL in the underlying structure of this
sentence as a marker of the epistemicity. Such an analysis is so implausible,

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 RODNEY HUDDLESTON

Palmer concludes, that it shows the premise to be false

all damaging, for the premise is in no way implied by
that there is no semantic necessity for sentences li
constraint on unreal apodoses is that the finite verb mu
set given above. Of these, SHALL and WILL have, in som
specific meaning and are accordingly used when the speaker does not wish to
express the more specific meaning encapsulated in the others. The fact that
they are the semantically 'unmarked' members of the set does not imply, how-
ever, that they are semantically empty, that when they occur in an unreal
apodosis they lose all the meaning that they have when they occur in construc-
tions where they contrast with a non-modal form. On the contrary, the above
discussion demonstrates, I believe, a clear continuity of meaning between the
WILL of real and unreal apodoses. There is no natural cut-off point where we can
say that WILL ceases to have any meaning at all within the language system.1
Palmer's second argument involves a rejection of my claim that an epistemic
modal can fall within the scope of a past: 'it is more reasonable to hold that
epistemic modals never fall within the scope of a Past Tense since they relate to a
judgment being made at the time of speaking' (78). However, the rule will not
stand in this unqualified form whatever analysis we give for conditionals. In
He knew he might have offended her, for example, it is clear that the MAY does
not relate to a judgment being made at the time of speaking. Lyons' distinction
between subjective and objective modality is highly relevant here. Subjective
modality is associated with the 'neustic', objective modality with the 'tropic', and
it is just the former that qualifies the performative component of the utterance
and which thus necessarily relates to a judgment being made at the time of the
utterance. Lyons argues at length that it is a mistake to treat epistemic MAY and
MUST as always expressing subjective modality, even though that is how they are
most often used. It seems to me that unreal conditions belong naturally with the
type where the modality is not subjective and that there is consequently no
argument based on the meaning of epistemic modality against analysing WILL as
falling within the scope of a past in sentences like (i).
The main reason I had given for saying that WILL is here within the scope of the
past is that we could not otherwise explain why the contingent event can be
future relative to the time of speaking, as in

(6) If he had lived he would have taken over the leadership when Tom retires
next year.

[i] I should add that Palmer treats volitional WILL as modal, so that the WILL of I would
have come if you had asked me (1977: I9) is not empty. Again this seems to impose an
unjustifiably sharp distinction on the language system. Is If 3'ohn had been called as a
witness he would probably have misled the jury an ambiguous SENTENCE, with WILL empty
in one interpretation, meaningful in another?

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 Would have become: EMPTY OR MODAL 'WILL'?

If have taken were past relative to a deictic present associated with WILL it wo
be incompatible with the future time specifier expressed in the when-clause.
Palmer acknowledges that his analysis raises the problem of 'how a Past Unreal
form may refer to the future'. He suggests that the have is redundant in such
cases: 'would [alone] is equally appropriate and not semantically different [from
would have]' (79). He seems to be saying that when there is 'reference to the
future [relative to the time of the speech act]' in would have V-en, the HAVE too is
semantically empty, introduced by a redundancy rule - that in such cases would
have become is underlyingly a non-past unreal. This distinction between two
interpretations or semantic analysis of would have V-en seems to me quite
unworkable. It is misleading to talk about the verbal form itself referring to a
deictic future: it is the when-clause in (6) that establishes that the time of taking
over the leadership is future relative to the time of speaking. Palmer says that he
cannot see any difference between he would have been a colonel now and he would
be a colonel now as apodoses to if he had stayed in the army. But if we replace now
by soon the difference becomes quite clear:

(7) If he had stayed in the army, he would soon (i) have been a colonel.
(ii) be J

In (7ii), soon is necessarily deictic: 'in a short while from now'. In (7i), howeve
it can be interpreted non-deictically as 'in a short while from then'. Depending
on how recent 'then' was, 'in a short while from then' could extend to cover 'in a
short while from now', so that (7i), with non-deictic soon, does not exclude the
case where being a colonel is future relative to the time of speaking. But it is not
ambiguous according to whether being a colonel is future or not, just as If he had
lived he would have taken over the leadership is not ambiguous according as the
taking over is before or after 'now': it simply does not relate the time of the taking
over to the time of the speech act. The situation is like that we find in indirect
discourse. In Mary said he will take over the leadership we have a non-past
(interpreted as future) relative to the deictic present of will: the speaker relates
the event to the time of his own speech act, not Mary's. But in Alary said he
would take over the leadership, the event is non-past/future relative to the past of
would: Mary's speech act provides the reference point, and the sentence is
again not ambiguous according as the event is past or future relative to 'now'.
Again, Lyons' recent discussion of tense and modality (1977: 809-823)
provides a framework within which these facts can be handled. He assigns
temporal indices to the three components of the utterance that he distinguishes,
phrastic, (tj), tropic (ti) and neustic (t0), where to is the time of the speech act.
In the direct discourse interpretation of It was raining, to = ti>tj, i.e. 'It is a
fact that it was raining'. In the ('backshifted') indirect discourse interpretation,
to> ti = tj, i.e. 'It was a fact that it is raining'. The tense associated with B
in the first interpretation is deictic in that it relates the time to ti = to, but in the

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 RODNEY HUDDLESTON

backshifted interpretation it is non-deictic in that it

shifted he would take over the leadership (where 'take
'will' to the tropic), we have t0> ti < tj, which is consis
course entail, to<tJ* I am arguing that 'backshifting
apodoses (a quite standard view: traditional discussions of 'sequence of tense
rules' cover conditionals as well as indirect discourse), so that here too to > t, and
the tense of the phrastic is non-deictic.
This explains, finally, why it is not necessary to postulate an underlying WILL
in the structure of Palmer's CAN example. Consider the analysis of If you had
entered the competition, you could have won it, which does not encode any informa-
tion about the time of the competition relative to to. 'Can' here belongs in the
phrastic. There can of course be more than one temporal index within the
phrastic owing to the possibility of embedding: let us associate tj with 'can' and tk
with 'win'. It is perhaps debatable whether we should analyse as to > ti < t i= tk or
to>ti -tJ<tk2 (the discussion in Palmer, I977, would suggest the latter) but
both are correctly consistent with either to > tk or to < tk. What permits these tw
contextualizations is the non-deictic nature of the phrastic tense in past unreal
apodoses: there is no explanatory need for a WILL.

REFERENCES

Huddleston, R. D. (I977). Past tense transportation in English. JL 13. 43-52.

Lyons, J. (I977). Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Palmer, F. R. (1974). The English verb. London: Longman.
Palmer, F. R. (I977). Modals and actuality. YL I3. 1-23.
Palmer, F. R. (I 978). Past tense transportation: a reply. 3L 14. 77-8 i.

[2] The same question arises with non-past real conditions like If youi enter the competition
you can win it: is this to = t; < tj = tk or to = t, = tj < tk? The question thus concerns
the interpretation of CAN in conditionals in general: the past unreal components do not
bring in any special factors.

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