Deontic or epistemic? <sc><i>habēre</i></sc> as a modal marker of future certainty in Macedonian
The Macedonian verb <i>ima</i> ‘have’, which is primarily used for possession and existence, can acquire various modal meanings in construction with the untensed <i>da-</i>clause. According to their semantic and syntactic properties, these constructions can be grouped into classes that represent different levels of grammaticalization. In this paper, we examine the most advanced grammaticalized constructions with inflected and uninflected <i>ima</i>, and we differentiate them on semantic grounds. The analysis focuses on uninflected <i>ima</i>, which exhibits a range of deontic and epistemic meanings which are of theoretical and typological significance. What is especially challenging is the meaning of future certainty that renders a future epistemic qualification. We propose that these meanings of uninflected<i> ima</i> cannot be understood properly without taking into account discourse factors.
