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Jennifer Coates comes up with a diagram listing modal auxiliaries on one side, classifying their underlying semantics on the other: obligation, inference, possibility, ability, permission, volition, prediction, hypothesis, quasi-subjective. The arrows linking the deceptively simple words crisscross the diagram in bewildering confusion. After running her computer across a corpus of 545,000 words of English text, justifiably she concludes that “the ‘untidiness’ of the data has involved a recognition of indeterminacy.”¹⁸³

In our transpositional grammar, we are going to distinguish three general forms of conditionality in agency: assertion, requirement, and possibility. These are not neatly separated buckets, because the one kind of meaning is always ready to slide into the other. We’re more interested in transposability across a vector of conditionality than finding points that can be fixed, no matter how finely specified.

Fig. 2.3 presents a rough map of conditionality across the forms of meaning we have been describing in this book.

Fig. 2.3: Conditionality

Take an object, for instance a tool. It exists in its presence, composition and structure (assertion). The tool has an immanent action structure that requires its user to interact with it in particular ways (requirement). And it opens out potentials for use that are both open to variety and constrained by the tool’s affordances (possibility). When sentient creatures encounter and use objects in their lives – ants collecting and carrying food back to a nest, for instance – they have at their disposal the same range of immanent meanings.

A problem that arises here for a text-based theory of conditionality is the ambiguity of its most basic terms. “May” can mean both permission to act (in relation to a requirement) and empirical hypothesis (possibility). “Must” can mean both command (requirement) and certain consequence (assertion). The semantics of conditionality does not clearly map onto text. Semanticists tackle this problem by distinguishing epistemic from deontic conditionality, or reference to the conditions of knowing compared to the conditions of acting.¹⁸⁴ But this distinction is not so clear: to act is to know, and knowing is grounded in action.

Then there are interrogatives and negatives that push meanings in a different semantic direction than the unqualified auxiliary. “Must you?” pushes the requirement “must” in the direction of possibility. “Can not” pushes the possibility “can” in the direction of requirement. These cut across assertion, requirement, and possibility, not just turning conditionalities into questions or negatives of the same kind, but changing their kind.

If these distinctions are so very unclear in text, it means that in order to make sense of conditionality we have to rely on things other than words. We have no alternative but to resort to multimodality, where text is in integral relation to meanings in image, space, object, body, sound, or speech. And on the dimension of functional transposition, instead of trying to subclassify fine gradations of conditionality, we can look for movement across and between the larger differences between assertion, requirement, and possibility.

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¹⁸¹ John Lyons, 1977, Semantics, Volume 2, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 792.

¹⁸² M.A.K. Halliday and Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, 2014, Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar (Edn 4), Milton Park, UK: Routledge, p. 162.

¹⁸³ Jennifer Coates, 1983, The Semantics of Modal Auxiliaries, London, UK: Croom Helm, pp. 5, 3.

¹⁸⁴ John Lyons, 1977, Semantics, Volume 2, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 791, 841–42.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 237–239. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Conditionality §MS2.3