RECENT ADVANCES IN THE STUDY OF MULTIPLE MODALS (FOCUS ON: THE DIALECTS OF SCOTS)

Pavlenko Alexander Evgenievich, Gukalova Nadezhda Vladimirovna

Multiple modals (MMs) – e.g. will can or might could – have been studied less thouroughly on the Scottish evidence than on the American one. There are numerous gaps in the description of the history of their origin, geography of distribution, list of possible modal combinations, as well as their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features. From the point of view of linguistic pragmatics, the use of MMs is associated with a set of communicative contexts correlated with polite conversation featuring careful or tentative utterances. The main difficulty in studying MMs is their low frequency. Such usages are rare, due to the limitations of a pragma stylistic nature mentioned above. The level of research into the Scottish area of MMs in general and the Scottish Borders region in particular is relatively low, and their description is fragmentary. Further insight into the phenomenon of MMs focusing on the Scottish evidence may be of use for a wide range of linguistic studies.

Keywords:multiple modals (MMs), the Scots language, the Scottish Borders, southern dialects of Scots, variation.