Ambiguity in Critical Contexts: The Lexical Split of the German Modal dürfte
Ambiguity in Critical Contexts: The Lexical Split of the German Modal dürfte

Summary/Abstract: The present-day German modal verb dürfen (‘to be allowed to do sth’) is currently undergoing a lexical split in its grammaticalisation. In the subjunctive II, dürfte, it is developing into an epistemic marker of phoric non-factuality used to express a speaker-based judgment of the probability of a given proposition (Politt 2022). Epistemic dürfte thus grammaticalises into the grammatical category mood, whereas its non-epistemic form remains part of a lexical class of modals. While dürfte is known to have progressed quite far on its grammaticalisation path, somewhere between stage 3 and 4, it still shows remnants of grammaticalisation stage 2 (Lehmann 2002, Diewald 2009). The present paper analyses 92 ambiguous sentences of dürfte taken from the DWDS core corpus of the 20th century (Geyken 2007). These sentences are assumed to exhibit critical contexts, which are remnants of grammaticalisation stage 2 (cf. Diewald 2009). They can be interpreted both as epistemic or as non-epistemic. Since the epistemic reading of dürfte is assumed to have developed into the default interpretation for the subjunctive II (Mortelmans 2019, Politt 2022), the ambiguous sentences are analysed in regard to their similarity to typical contexts for epistemic dürfte for three classes of features: (i) features of the subject, (ii) of the verbal complement, and (iii) the sentence context. On the one hand, variation can be found in all three feature classes, indicating that the grammaticalization has not yet progressed fully out of stage 2. On the other hand, a tendency for favouring an epistemic interpretation of the ambiguous sentence could be shown, too, illustrating the developing functional independence of epistemic dürfte.

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