Two kinds of epistemic modality in Hungarian
Ferenc Kiefer · 2018
The article provides an overview of epistemic expressions in Hungarian. The bulk of the article is devoted to the discussion of the meaning of the possibility suffix, which may express plain possibility but may also have an evidential use in which case it expresses probability rather than plain possibility. The two meanings correlate with two different sentence structures. In the first case the modal verb (i.e. the suffixed verb form) carries main stress and is followed by the complement(s) of the verb, in the second case the modal verb is unstressed and is preceded by a focused constituent. It will be shown that the second meaning is evidential. The two meanings will be termed epistemic possibility and evidential probability, respectively. Epistemic necessity is expressed by a verb whose meaning, however, is not very different from epistemic possibility. The last section of the article discusses some aspects of the uses of modal particles and modal adverbials.