Acquisitive modals

The paper explores the fact that ‘get’ etymons may acquire modal meanings. It tries to fit this fact into the modal map proposal of van der Auwera & Plungian (1998) and concludes that the map has to be revised, in part because the lexical input, the predicates meaning ‘get/acquire’ allow more than one reading, an agentive and a receptive one. The paper focuses on the two areas in which so-called ‘acquisitiv modality’ is very prominent, viz. Northern Europe and South(east) Asia.