Beyond Deontic Modality: Possibilities, Necessities, and Social Norms

We report a study of expressions of possibility and necessity in the context of sanctioning problematic behaviour: modal sanctions. The study is comparative on two dimensions: We compare across two types of context, oriented to codified rules (playing board games) or to social norms (breakfast with the family), and across four European languages: British English, German, Italian and Polish. We find that (1) only around 16% of sanctioning attempts in mundane social interaction draw on modal expressions; (2) modal sanctions invoke a variety of backgrounds, not just deontic ones; (3) sanctions enforcing codified rules are lean and orient to information, whereas sanctions enforcing social norms are larger and orient to negotiation; (4) interrogative sanctions are used differently across the four languages. In sum, the study shows the importance of data from comparable activities for contrastive pragmatics, and explores the relation of deontic semantics to broader meanings of unacceptability.