| Summary: | Summary of the thesis We use modal expressions to talk about permissions, obligations and desires (e.g. Peter must/may/ wants to leave) as well as how certain we are of something (e.g. It must/might/may be raining). Like other parts of language, there is not always a one-to-one correspondence between the meaning of a modal in one language and the meaning of a modal in another language. The thesis provides semantic and pragmatic analyses of modal expressions in the endangered Inuktut dialect Uummarmiutun. In other words, it accounts for a) what exactly the modals in Uummarmiutun mean (their semantics), and b) how they are used to communicate different meaning nuances when they are used in different contexts (their pragmatics). Uummarmiutun is spoken mainly by Elders in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in Canada. The linguistics literature has paid significant attention to modal expressions in Indo-European languages such as English, German and Norwegian. The body of in-depth empirical and theoretical investigations of modality in other language families has just recently begun to grow, and the thesis is a contribution to the growing understanding of modal expressions in the languages of the world. To perform the study, the thesis first discusses various definitions of modality. It argues that modal meaning is best understood as unrealized force-dynamic potential (Boye, 2005), and it shows that this definition is accurate and rich enough to identify modal expressions in a language. To ensure cognitively plausible analyses of the pragmatic as well as the semantic properties of the modals, the thesis makes use of the relevance-theoretic (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995) framework. It builds on Papafragou’s (2000) model, which was originally developed on the basis of English. Through the application on Uummarmiutun modals, the thesis refines and extends the cross-linguistic applicability of Papafragou’s model. The study is based on interviews with native speakers of Uummarmiutun in Inuvik in Canada. During our ...
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