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| Format: | Recurso digital |
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Zenodo
2026
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| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18522907 |
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Table of Contents:
- <p><span>This paper reanalyzes English modals (</span><span>can, may, must, will, shall</span><span>) not as verbs, auxiliaries, or<br>T-heads, but as </span><span>typed closure gates </span><span>in the English ghost-system. Parallel to the definite article<br>and infinitival </span><span>to</span><span>, modals are treated as </span><span>partial operators </span><span>defined only on independently<br>admitted predicational bases (PredBase), yielding </span><span>closed modalized predicates </span><span>(Pred_MOD)<br>that higher templates can host. Under this view, the classical “defective verb” profile—absence<br>of non-finite forms, bare-V selection, resistance to nominalization—follows from </span><span>gate-typing</span><span>,<br>not from stipulative gaps in a verbal paradigm.<br>The analysis is embedded in a </span><span>two-level grammar </span><span>with an OBJ/META regime discipline: in<br>OBJ, modals exhibit </span><span>strict undefinedness </span><span>on non-admissible classes (</span><span>must frankly</span><span>, </span><span>must that</span><span>),<br>while META mention-constructors (WORD/SAY/QUOTE) create admissible targets that<br>support </span><span>target-shift repairs</span><span>. Independent admission diagnostics (HOST + RED/DED) prevent<br>circularity by defining PredBase without reference to the modal itself.<br>We unify modals with the broader ghost-connector family (Y, CH, D_art, TO_inf, NOT),<br>provide a boxed proposition for MOD_op, and supply falsifier-grade predictions. A<br>preregisterable acceptability experiment (48 critical + 48 fillers) and analysis scripts<br>operationalize the predicted </span><span>gate signature</span><span>: OBJ-low / META-high for hard classes, stability for<br>admitted bases. The result is a single, testable closure-gate architecture that replaces the<br>auxiliary-verb view with a morphodynamically grounded operator theory.</span> </p>