Multiple Modal Constructions in Rural Chesapeake English and Mandarin Chinese

Multi-modal constructions, (also called `modal stacking') appear in a number of natural languages; most notably in the literature are Southern (or Rural) American English, Scots English, Caribbean Creoles, German, Dutch, and the Chinese languages. Cross-linguistically there is considerable variation in the number of modals allowable in the syntax, from simple double-modal constructions in Southern American English (Labov, 1972; Di Paolo, 1989; Hasty, 2012; Ellison, 2007 inter alia), to up to four projections in languages like Mandarin Chinese (Lin, 2012). The present study focusses on Southern English and Mandarin to answer long-standing theoretic questions about how multiple-modal constructions are derived, adopting a feature-geometric approach (Harley, 1994; Cowper, 2005 inter alia) to Distributed Morphology (Harley & Noyer, 2003). I posit that there are two distinct types of languages which exhibit multiple modality, exemplied by Mandarin and Southern English (respectively): those in which multiple-modality is a product of a recursive Modal Phrase, and those which are produced from a post-syntactic split of the INFL domain