Would have become: empty or modal will

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Abstract
In an earlier paper (Huddleston, 1977) I analysed the would of (I) If he had stayed in the army, he would have become a colonel as the unreal mood form of an epistemic modal verb WILL that figures in the underlying syntactic representation and falls within the semantic scope of a past element realized by HAVE. Palmer (1978) criticizes this analysis, claiming that WILL is ‘obviously’ semantically empty, a mere ‘dummy’ inserted to carry the mark of unreality – that would have become is ‘the Unreal and Past form of BECOME’.

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