Abstract

As Sapir (1921) and Haiman (1995) note, grammaticalization of emotional concepts is much less common than that of concepts like modalities. In this paper, I will investigate so-called “emotional should, ” and argue that it is one of the rare instances of grammatical forms encoding emotional concepts. In the literature, it is often analyzed to express non-factual concepts, as other uses of quasisubjunctive should do, in the effort to treat all uses of quasisubjunctive should in exactly the same way. This enterprise, however, runs into serious difficulties. Of course, I am also conscious of the ontogenetical relationship between emotional should and other uses of quasi-subjunctive should, but in the former, the main function has shifted to signaling a speech act which I call “emotional expression.” As for the question of how this development occurred, it will be proposed that emotional should was derived from epistemic uses of quasi-subjunctive should through “discourse-strategic usage extension, ”i.e.extension of the usage of a grammatical form which aims to linguistically express a new speech act utilizing its pragmatic effect. As such, emotional should can be conceived of as a regular outgrowth of quasi-subjunctive should.