Documents in scientific newspapers are often marked by attitudes and opinions of the author and/or other persons, who contribute with objective and subjective statements and arguments as well. In this respect, the attitude is often accomplished by a linguistic modality. As in languages like english, french and german, the modality is expressed by special verbs like can, must, may, etc. and the ...

Immediate effects of verb-specific syntactic (subcategorization) information were found in a cross-modal naming experiment, a self-paced reading experiment, and an experiment in which eye movements were monitored. In the reading studies, syntactic misanalysis effects in sentence complements (e.g., "The student forgot the solution was...") occurred at the verb in the complement (e.g., was) for m...

This paper presents an annotation scheme for English modal verbs together with sense-annotated data from the news domain. We describe our annotation scheme and discuss problematic cases for modality annotation based on the inter-annotator agreement during the annotation. Furthermore, we present experiments on automatic sense tagging, showing that our annotations do provide a valuable training r...

Futurity can be signalled in English in a great variety of ways. [Aarts reviews previous statements concerning the progressive and non-progressive present with future reference.] There is considerable agreement among authors who have dealt with this topic, but to define the conditions that cause a speaker to choose the one form rather than the other would call for a detailed study. The importan...

In the context of the study of modality in interaction with time, the phenomenon whereby a modalized proposition entails its non-modal counterpart has been known as an ‘actuality entailment’ since Bhatt (1999). The question that actuality entailments raise is how modal statements can be distinguished from their non-modal counterparts and how modal contributes meaning. The main idea that the pap...

Epistemic modality, a linguistic category, particularly deals with the interactive dimensions of various discourses. modality in broad terms can be defined as any modal system that indicates degree assurance what speaker says. The present study identifies and analyzes epistemic verbs EMVs dissertations linguistics literature. For this purpose, two sub-corpora Ph.D. from fields literature were c...

We discuss and analyze two subject agreement markers in Logooli (Bantu, Kenya). We show that e(class 9 subject agreement) and ga(class 6 subject agreement) give rise to a variety of apparently evidential or modal meanings when they occur in constructions translated with “expletive” subjects. We propose a treatment of the Logooli data following Matthewson, Rullmann & Davis’s (2007) and Rullmann,...

A production experiment investigated the tonal shape of Finnish finite verbs in transitive sentences without narrow focus. Traditional descriptions of Finnish stating that nonfocused finite verbs do not receive accents were only partly supported. Verbs were found to have a consistently smaller pitch range than words in other word classes, but their pitch contours were neither flat nor explainab...

This article discusses two related case marking phenomena in Estonian. The first issue is representing partitive morphosemantics as it is expressed in the language specific aspectual, epistemic modal and evidential grammatical categories. A DRT based sketch of propositional attitudes and speaker-hearer relationships explicates several semantic links between the categories. The second case marki...

The set of English modal verbs is widely recognized to communicate two broad clusters of meanings: epistemic and root modal meanings. A number of researchers have claimed that root meanings are acquired earlier than epistemic ones; this claim has subsequently been employed in the linguistics literature as an argument for the position that English modal verbs are polysemous (Sweetser, 1990). In ...