The development of modal particles and its implication in the syntax:

the case of Basque ahal

Abstract

The Basque language marks modality by means of functional elements traditionally termed 'modal particles'. Two of those particles are the epistemic particle ahal and the question particle al; these two particles and the modal verb ahal ('to be able to') share the same phonetic form namely [al] in most varieties. Nevertheless, they are distinguishable since they have separate behaviour regarding some syntactic properties such as: a) cliticisation, b) distribution concerning negation and aspect, c) occurrence in contexts lacking illocutionary force, and d) degree of pragmaticalisation. Based on the aforementioned properties and on their geographical distribution and history, I argue that they are related diachronically as follows: the modal verb ahal gave rise to the modal particle ahal and the latter resulted into the question particle al. Such grammaticalisation patterns are found cross-linguistically (Wegener 2002; Hack 2014). Therefore, the reanalysis of those elements driven by the ambiguity in the interpretation brought a new distribution and a higher syntactic position for the grammaticalised elements and, ultimately, a simpler syntactic structure avoiding move operations.