Objective and subjective deontic modal necessity in FDG – evidence from Spanish auxiliary expressions

The theory of FDG claims that deontic modality can be either participant-oriented or event-oriented, both distinctions forming part of the Representational Level. However, there is evidence from Spanish and a number of other languages that event-oriented deontic modality can be coded twice, with different values in one and the same State-of-Affairs. We will therefore distinguish between objective and subjective deontic modality, where the latter has scope over the former. On the basis of the ways in which the expressions of subjective and objective deontic modality interact with tense and other modal distinctions, we will propose a refinement of the internal structure of the Representational Level in order to accommodate this distinction.