Modal interrogatives as discourse-level constructions: collostructional analysis and LLM surprisal

Abstract

This study investigates the constructional organization of modal interrogatives by examining how modal meaning shapes response behavior. Previous research on question-response systems has largely focused on canonical polar questions, treating response particles such as yes and no as markers of propositional polarity. However, modal interrogatives introduce additional interpretive dimensions in which responses may perform discourse actions such as authorization, refusal, or epistemic endorsement. To examine whether modal interrogatives exhibit construction-specific response patterns, this study analyzes may and might interrogatives using corpus-based collostructional analysis and large language model surprisal measures. Collostructional analysis identifies distributional associations between interrogative constructions and lexical items, while LLM-based surprisal provides a probabilistic diagnostic of semantic compatibility in constructional contexts. The results reveal systematic constructional differentiation between the two constructions. The may interrogative strongly attracts first-person subjects, interaction-oriented verbs, and affirmative responses, signifying its prototypical permission-seeking use. In contrast, the might interrogative preferentially combines with non-first-person subjects, stative predicates, and evaluative responses associated with epistemic assessment. Surprisal values align with these distributional preferences, indicating that lexically compatible realizations are more strongly predicted in context. These findings suggest that modal interrogative-response pairings constitute discourse-level constructions characterized by both distributional entrenchment and probabilistic expectancy.