Negation and Deontic Modals Expressing Obligation in Spanish: The Case of “Deber” and “Tener Que”

Abstract

The present article addresses the relationship between negation and the Spanish deontic modal periphrases deber (‘must’) + infinitive and tener que (‘have to’) + infinitive. Although both periphrases express obligation, they differ in the scope they display with respect to negation: while deber exhibits a wide scope, tener que shows a narrow scope. Our main goal is to establish which specific properties motivate the TPP behavior of deber. Our proposal is that the notion of “obligation” derives, assuming Ramchand’s (2018) model, from two different semantic operations: on the one hand, tener que would perform an exhaustive selection of alternatives; on the other hand, deber would express an exclusive selection, by which the most highly ranked situation given a deontic preference order is selected. One of the main consequences of this difference is, as the article shows, the distribution of actuality entailment readings in “indefinido” contexts, which is required for tener que.