Thread by @emilymbender

For the curious, here are the results of my #unscientificpoll about questions in double modals, plus some reflections:

https://twitter.com/emilymbender/status/1102670026396430336

So, "Might Pat could leave?" was slightly more popular than "Might could Pat leave?" but the majority answer by far was neither of those. >>

I suspect that's because many people who answered the poll just wanted to see the results, and 'neither' seemed like the best answer in that case. >>

But also, I left out a possibility, which might actually be the preferred one, according to this helpful blog post from the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project:

ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/mult…

That would have been: "Could Pat might leave?"

h/t @ChitaleVarun for the pointer to the post!

An #unscientificpoll directed at #linguistics twitter is definitely not the way to actually study this. Among other things: (1) I have no way of verifying if the answerers are actually double-modal speakers nor which variety of English they speak;

(2) I didn't get a chance to contextualize the question (when might it even make sense?); (3) I didn't get to ask people *how* they'd make a question out of a double modal sentence;

(4) it's better to ask non-linguists, who @cbrew pointed out, wouldn't know what I meant by the question; (5) probably lots of other reasons. >>

It did, however, spur a reply with that helpful link, so that's good! /fin

ps. I'm not quite sure how to get "m2 subj m1 VP" as the question form given the HPSG analysis of subj-aux inversion. The blog post also has interesting data about negation in these constructions. So my student was definitely right that these are interesting questions!