Modal Concord: A Case Study of Dutch

The combination of a modal verb and a modal adverb that is similar in modal force (possibility/necessity) and flavor (epistemic/deontic, etc.) allows a concord interpretation in which the two modals somehow ‘fuse’ and communicate just a single modality. This paper presents a case study of modal concord, as it is exemplified in Dutch. It seems that speakers of this language tend to add modal adverbs to modal verbs in order to disambiguate the meaning of that verb. To deal with this phenomenon, I propose modal adverbs are domain restriction devices, not unlike if -clauses, but that come with additional information about the force of the quantifier for which they provide the restrictor.