Cross-linguistic annotation of modality: a data-driven hierarchical model

We present an annotation model of modality which is (i) cross-linguistic, relying on a wide, strongly typologically motivated approach, and (ii) hierarchical and layered, accounting for both factuality and speaker’s attitude, while modelling these two aspects through separate annotation schemes. Modality is defined through cross-linguistic categories, but the classification of actual linguistic expressions is language-specific. This makes our annotation model a powerful tool for investigating linguistic diversity in the field of modality on the basis of real language data, being thus also useful from the perspective of machine translation systems.