Should
The Remainder
article
SHOULD. In my resolution to investigate words suggested to me only by my most loyal and adoring fans (if you exist please email me at j.clarke@arts.ac.uk) – which, in reality, has meant nagging my colleagues, family, friends and the sticky editorial team – I have so far this year explored a satisfyingly wide array of terms: SHOCK, CRINGE, ABUNDANCE, SUBLIME, SLOP-WORK and PANDEMONIUM. This month, however, I have been tasked with what I can only describe as a ‘missing word’ – SHOULD.
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‘Should’ of course does appear in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) – in the everyday sense of an ‘obligation’ or ‘expectation’ – but is listed as an inflection of ‘shall’, without an independent entry (by which I mean webpage1) of its own. Etymologically this is because, in a somewhat simplified definition, the term ‘should’ emerged as a kind-of past tense form of shall – i.e. ‘shall-ed’ – in the Old English form ‘sceolde’ (inflected from ‘sceal’). More technically ‘shall’ was inherited as a preterite-present verb2 – a peculiar feature of Germanic languages – whereby a small class of important verbs, that might at first appear to follow the pattern of ‘strong-verbs’ (in which the vowel in the stem changes to indicate tense: i.e. swim/swam/swum), had their past and present tenses effectively swapped…
An example of this in Old English might be the term ‘to know’ = ‘witan’ , a preterite-present verb in which the apparent past tense form functions as the present (‘wāt’ = “I know”), while a new weak past (‘wiste’ = “I knew”) was created to replace the original past, reversing the expected tense relationship. A parallel can be seen in ‘shall’ and ‘should’, where the Old English ‘sceolde’ – originally the past of ‘sceal’ – later went through a series of semantic developments in its own right, to (kind-of) become a word in its own right.
So, this ‘preterite-present system’ is the historical origin of what – in Modern English – we call ‘auxiliary verbs’, of which ‘shall’ is a member, along with a few others such as ‘can’, ‘may’, ‘must’, etc. This system is ultimately why these verbs (sometimes labelled ‘defective’!) behave so unusually in Modern English, lacking standard inflectional forms such as participles – no ‘shall-ing’ or ‘shall-ed’ – or infinitives – no ‘to shall’ – instead functioning as a closed set of ‘auxiliaries’, or ‘helping’ verbs. Their corresponding ‘past’ forms – ‘could’, ‘might’, ‘would’, and ‘should’ – are not, therefore, straightforward past tenses in the modern sense, but historically related forms that developed alongside the original Germanic and Old English systems.
Over time, these pairs (can/could, may/might, shall/should) came to express not so much temporal distinctions, but rather ‘modal’ ones – which is to say indications of truth, use or mood – such as possibility (could), obligation (should), and hypotheticality (might). It is interesting, and perhaps useful to note in the context of this grammatical history, that these examples often indicate a kind of ‘force’ within a given statement, which linguists and logicians sometimes frame more generally on a scale between ‘possibility’ (‘may’) and ‘necessity’ (‘must’). This is, in part, why they are called ‘helping’ verbs, because they precede and ‘modulate’ a sentence’s ‘main verb’: “You should run”, “You could run”, “You might run” (rather than simply “You– run”).
In this way modal words complicate the simple (but intuitive?) lexical framework of ‘content’ vs ‘function’ words – the former carrying information through nouns, ‘main verbs’, adjectives, etc; and the latter acting as a kind-of ‘glue’ via prepositions, pronouns, articles, etc. Modals sit awkwardly across these categories: grammatically they behave like function words – a closed, uninflectable class that exists only to support a main verb (similar to, for example, prepositions: ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘at’, ‘by’, etc) – and yet, as we've seen, they carry a type of semantic ‘mood’ or ‘force’ one would expect from content words (i.e. ‘run’).
In her 1977 paper “What ‘must’ and ‘can’ must and can mean” German semanticist Angelika Kratzer introduced a notion of ‘force’ (outlined above) that sought to resolve this conflict, by relocating the content of modal words away from the word itself and onto the logical operation it performs: a modal doesn’t describe a thing in the world so much as stake out a claim about how many possible worlds – ways reality might have turned out – a given statement holds true in. For example, ‘must’ has maximal force because it ‘survives’ in every such world; ‘may’ has minimal force because it survives in only some.
Reframing modality in this way allowed Kratzer to effectively circumvent the variety of things ‘must’ can possibly mean, when parsing the semantic content of a given phrase. She opens her paper with the example: “You must and you can store must in a can.” Here, ‘must’ and ‘can’ function both as nouns – grape juice and a metal tin – and modal verbs. Through further examples she goes on to show how the modal ‘must’ seems to mean something different in sentence after sentence: duty, knowledge, disposition, preference, and everything in between. Before her intervention, the obvious response would be to multiply the word into separate entries: must (1), must (2), must (3), and so on for as long as the list demands. Kratzer, however, resists this – in her account, there is only one 'must': a single relational kernel of meaning, whose particular ‘flavour’ is supplied by context rather than fixed to the word itself.
However, this framework (as a binary system) deals only with two ‘forces’ – necessity and possibility – leaving terms like ‘should’ at a loss: stronger than ‘may’, yet weaker than ‘must’. To resolve this Kratzer introduced the idea of ‘ranking’ the worlds a given context makes relevant, rather than simply admitting or excluding them – the ‘should’ in “You should run” is, therefore, ‘true’ not in every relevant world, but only the best of them: the ones, for example, in which you can actually run, and it is the right thing to do! In short, she reframed modality from asking ‘which sense of the word is this?’ to ‘which set of background assumptions – which world – is the context giving us…?’
Of course, it is here – in such formal, mathematical theories of how language, semantics and meaning might be converted into a kind of code – in which we can see the premise of this columns’ namesake (The Remainder) written: that in the desire to separate the ‘relevant’ from the ‘irrelevant’ uses of language, one inevitably obscures and forecloses certain uses, possibilities, perhaps even certain worlds. Affect, context, violence, ‘the world’, appears not from the ‘outside’ – as something from which meaning or information can be excised – but as an immanent property of language itself.
In The Violence of Language (1990), the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Lecercle writes: “Language is no longer a mere instrument, it seems to have acquired a life of its own. Language speaks, it follows its own rhythm, its own partial coherence, it proliferates in apparent, and sometimes violent, chaos.” Yes, Lecercle – who coined The Remainder – reminds us that a residue of social history, culture, play, and lived ambiguity remains, which no formal system, however refined, can fully absorb – it can only be chased, displaced, captured, appropriated, liberated, detourned. He asks the simple question: “What exactly do we mean when we claim that a linguistic analysis is correct?”
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None of this answers the question of why 'should' should give the sense of ‘obligation’ or ‘expectation’... The Old English sceolde descends from a Germanic root, skulan, meaning simply ‘to owe’. To be obligated, in this earliest sense, was not a moral or psychological state but a financial one; and this shift – from a literal sense to the modal one we use today (duty, expectation, the ‘right thing to do’ ) is a common pattern across languages, where the language of debt generalises into that of unmet obligation more broadly. ‘Ought’, similarly, preserves this history, having at one time also appeared as the past tense of ‘owe’.
Kratzer, in framing her argument through the concept of 'possible worlds', draws on the philosophy of the C17th polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (also German), for whom God surveys the totality of possible worlds and selects, by virtue of his perfection, the best of them to bring into actual existence. What is valuable in Kratzer's appropriation of this idea is that it retains the architecture of a kind of moral economy – ‘better’ or ‘worse’ worlds – while undermining the need for any single chooser ‘ranking’ from outside the system (except perhaps, that of the linguist herself).
Gilles Deleuze, in his reading of Leibniz as an early philosopher of the ‘multiplicity’, presses on this point: that the emergence of difference – of one world, one sense, one perspective, rather than another – must be explicable from within immanent experience itself, rather than deferred to a transcendent God who has already done the choosing. If this critique can be made of metaphysics, it might equally be made of language and of the moral compulsion Leibniz's theology prescribes in the idea of a ‘best’ world — the compulsion, in other words, of what we should do. Perhaps, freed from any single arbiter ranking our possible worlds from ‘the outside’, we might imagine one ‘better’ even than this: a world of other meanings, other words, and – perhaps – other obligations to one another.
This article was written for a monthly column in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout
Footnotes
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Preterite actually just means ‘past’ – so you could think of this like ‘past-present’ words. ↩