The ones I could see

I'm reading The City and the City by China Miéville at the moment. I'm only about 60 pages in but I already really like it, partly for its clever ideas which are currently just emerging, but also for its languages. Miéville has a linguistics background and this shows in the plot of some books (Embassytown, for example) and the writing in all of them: he's creative and clever and does really unusual things with words. Not that you need to have a linguistics background to be able to do that, but it seems like he really knows what he's doing with language. I don't know, I know nothing about literature, so I can only waffle in an uninformed way on that point. But his sentence structure is so clever sometimes, and in this book the characters are from somewhere in central Europe, so the names are all made up but completely believable, and things like that. I think there was even some zeugma at one point and I really love zeugma. 

[Very slight spoilers follow, maybe? Not sure, I haven't read enough of it myself to know.] 

One thing that made me stop and admire it today was a clever use of could. There are parts of the city that the main character can't see. The sentence that caught my eye was describing some railway arches. He says (my bolding):

Not all of them were foreign at their bases. The ones I could see contained little shops and squats decorated in art graffiti.

At this point in the story, the reader doesn't know what the concept is here. Is it that he was able to see the arches, or that he was permitted to see them? This latter idea is what other events have hinted towards, but so far it could be either. 

This is because can and could (present and past tense respectively) can mean two different things. The first meaning, where he was able to see the arches, illustrates logical modality, or the possibility of him seeing them. The second, where he was permitted to see them, illustrates deontic modality: what is possible within the rules. This is an absolutely lovely use of this ambiguity which allows him not to reveal too much of this conceptual device this early in the story. I'm pretty sure he knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote it that way. 

This ambiguity is also, by the way, why you get smartarses responding to a question like 'Can I go to the toilet?' with 'I don't know, can you?'. 

Double modal or double fluff?

Those of us who are interested in dialect syntax but don't make it their business to conduct experiments into it are always on the listen-out for interesting examples. You can't help it, after a while. On the Antiques Roadshow back in April, I heard one of the experts say this:

What date would that might have been?

He didn't stumble over it, it was very fluent production, so he either meant to say it or didn't notice what he'd said. But we seem to have a double modal construction here, something which is not found in Standard English and is attested but not common in certain dialects.

The modals are would and might, and if we put the sentence into a declarative form, you can see what the issue is:

That would might have been what date.

Either modal on its own is fine, but both together is not permitted in Standard English. As this is not part of my dialect I can't be sure that this particular combination is allowed in any dialect, but certainly two modal verbs can co-occur in many people's speech.

Not, however, in the antiques expert's speech, I'll bet. I would put money on this being a performance error, which went unnoticed because the fronting of the first modal would means that it's not adjacent to the second modal might. I would guess that he started out asking what date it would have been, and switched halfway through to asking what date it might have been, and the two met in the middle in a sticky mess. Perhaps the much higher frequency of would-questions than might-questions had some influence too (frequency estimation not based on any data or actual facts at all).

This kind of thing makes it so much harder to do dialect syntax through data collection. You might only have a few instances of double modal questions in hours of data, if you're working from interviews, and if a couple of them might be performance errors, how can you be sure of anything? This is why dialect syntacticians have to be cunning as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford, and devise data collection methods that they think will cause people to use more double modals, but without telling them that they want them to use double modals. And getting people to say something in a certain way is really bloody hard. Normal people seem to have this quaint idea that what you say is more important than the way you say it.