An empirical investigation into the semantic field of the Polish modal verb musieć (‘must’)

The empirical study described in the article examines the semantics of the Polish modal verb musieć (‘must’). The modal verb musieć can express both root (deontic) and epistemic meanings in Polish. The first category includes obligation or necessity for an event to occur. The second category comprises expressions of the speaker’s convictions that a given event exists or has occurred. The author attempts to disambiguate the meanings of musieć contextually. The study employs concepts derived from philosophy and adapts them to investigate authentic language samples recorded in the spoken subcorpus of the National Corpus of Polish. The analysis establishes the conversational backgrounds whose evaluation results in an epistemic or root readings of musieć and leads to the modal force of necessity. The study shows that one modal meaning results from a number of possible worlds a speaker evaluates. Some of them are directly related to the event the speaker expresses in the proposition. Their evaluation results in a root (deontic) meaning. Others are related to what the speaker thinks or what their opinion is. As a result, an epistemic meaning emerges. However, we cannot exclude that the speaker’s primary opinion is based on their evaluation of the event.