Testing the Gravitational Pull Hypothesis on modal verbs expressing obligation and necessity in Catalan through the COVALT corpus

Abstract

This chapter aims to test Halverson’s Gravitational Pull Hypothesis (GPH) on the Catalan modal verb caldre. Data from two comparable parallel sub-corpora from the COVALT corpus (English-Catalan and French-Catalan) are used to that end. However, caldre only serves as a starting point for hypothesis formulation and data analysis, as it is part of the wider network of modal verbs and verbal periphrases conveying obligation or necessity in Catalan. On the basis of networks of obligation and necessity in Catalan, English and French, three hypotheses are put forward: 1) caldre will be under-represented in the English-Catalan subcorpus when compared to Catalan non-translations; 2) caldre will be either over- or under-represented in the French-Catalan sub-corpus when compared to Catalan non-translations; and 3) caldre will be significantly more frequent in the French-Catalan than in the English-Catalan sub-corpus. Results confirm hypotheses 1 and 3, and for hypoth- esis 2 the scales are tipped in favour of over-representation, mainly as a result of strong connectivity between caldre and its French source text triggers. Connectiv- ity, in the present study, seems to be favoured by formal similarity, which comes in two forms: syntactic isomorphism and phonological/graphological similarity.