| Abstrakt: |
This article examines the relationship between subject expression and modal meaning in Tver Karelian modal verb constructions expressing necessity or possibility. Under investigation are clauses that include a finite form of pidiä 'must, have to', šuaha 'can, may' or voija 'can, may'. In their Finnish counterparts, pitää 'must, have to' is a unipersonal verb, which takes a genitive subject, whereas saada 'may, can' and voida 'can, may' agree with a nominative subject in person and number. According to previous studies, both the necessity and possibility modals of Karelian can, however, be used with an impersonal pattern where the subject is in an oblique case and shows no agreement with the predicate. The analysis of Tver Karelian modals confirms that pidiä invariably takes a subject in the adessive-allative, whereas in possibility constructions, the case marking is more variable and determined by both syntactic and semantic factors. With šuaha, the adessive-allative subject is the default choice when the verb forms a verb chain with the A-infinitive and expresses participant-internal or participant-external (im)possibility or necessity, whereas the nominative is used in clauses that express the verb's premodal meaning 'to get'. Voija can also take a subject both in the nominative and in the adessive-allative case. Regarding voija, however, the role of verbal person marking turned out to be more essential than the case marking of the subject NP. What unites all modals under investigation is that they are very willing to occur in subjectless 3rd person singular clauses, which easily receive a referentially open interpretation in dialectal data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
