Designation modality and the disposition of artifacts

Abstract

This article is about a modal construction of German that has hardly received any attention in the literature, and I link it to the philosophical notion of the disposition of artifacts. The name that I propose for this kind of modality is designation modality. It is instantiated by the sentence 'Dieser Wein ist zur Begleitung des Käses' ‘This wine is meant to accompany the cheese.’ Being a subtype of goal-oriented modality, it features a theme or instrument oriented semantics specifying the use to which an artifact is put. A modal head underlying the preposition+determiner element 'zu'+DET ‘to+DET’ combines the nominalized VoiceP in its comple ment with the external argument of the whole structure. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first proposal to trace the philosophical notion of the disposition of artifacts within a clearly delineated structure in natural language.