Negative modality in Hausa, Thai and Kîîtharaka

This paper presents, to our knowledge, the first attempt to describe crosslinguistic variation in the lexicalization of impossibility modals. We present novel data on the expression of negative modality, i.e. non-necessity (¬□ p) and impossibility (¬♢ p). Our data suggest that in several typologically unrelated languages, negative modality generally involves separate, overt expression of negation and a modal in any force/flavor combination except deontic impossibility (≈ prohibition). We illustrate this pattern in Hausa, Thai and Kîîtharaka, propose a (somewhat tentative) semantic analysis of deontic impossibility in these languages, and briefly outline how our observations may be captured in terms of optimization of the informativeness/complexity trade-off (see e.g. Kemp et al. 2018; Steinert-Threlkeld 2019; Uegaki 2023).