Grice uses 'volitive' in "Aspects of Reason", but since he used von Wright's 'alethic' he should have used Rescher's 'boulomaic'

From an online study on Korean grammar:


Volitive modality

"What I shall call volitive modality in my analysis is otherwise often refered to as
„boulomaic“ modality (e.g. Perkins (1983), Palmer (1986, 12 - who points out that actually it
should be bouletic), etc.), which is based on Rescher’s (1968) „boulomaic“ and is concerned
with the notion „X hopes/fears/regrets/desires that p“, but also has traits reaching back to
Jespersen’s (1924, 320f) treatment of optative and desiderative in which he contrasts between
what is realizable and what is non-realizable."


This binary distinction is translated by Palmer
(1986, 116) into wishing (unreal) and hoping (real).

While this argument has its loopholes (it
is based on instances of wishes in conjunction with irrealis conditionals, but wishes may also
be found with realis conditionals where no interpretation as „impossible wish“ is compulsory)
it is justified to a large extent by the following grammatical distinction (i.e. change of tense)
in English (which uses lexical items (namely the two verbs to hope, to wish) for the
expression of hopes and wishes (examples taken from Palmer (1986, 117):

(22a) I hope John is here now

IMS hopeMA JohnMU is here nowMP [implicit 1sg]MSo
[(hope)M ((I) (John) (is here now))P]

18As the examples illustrate, Chinese has an overtly marked distinction not only between dynamic and epistemic
possibility, but also as regards the two different sub-types of dynamic modality (a further possible distinction,
though not marked in Chinese, would be between internal and acquired knowledge), whereas some languages
mark no distinction at all (e.g. English can) and others distinguish partially (e.g. French savoir vs. pouvoir).
23

(22b) I wish John were here now

IMS wishMA JohnMU were here nowMP [implicit 1sg]MSo
[(wish)M ((I) (John) (were here now))P]

However, not all languages rely on lexical items to express volitive modality, as can be seen
from the following example from West Greenlandic (taken from Fortescue (1984, 97)) which
uses a modal suffix niri-:

(23) aqagu niri-uma-vaa
tomorrow eat-Sfx-3sg:3sg:Ind
„He wishes (wants) to eat it tomorrow“
aqagu niriMP umaMA vaa19
MU [implicit 3sg]MSo Æ MS
[(uma)M ((vaa) (aqagu niri))P]

The notions encoded as modal attitudes in volitive modality and the sources which in
general trigger such an attitude may be schematized in the following way:

(23) notion attitude
desire wish
hope
modal source personal will, intention