Academic discourse has always been the focus of many linguists, especially those who have been involved with English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and discourse analysis. Persuasion, as part of rhetorical structure of academic writing, is partly achieved by employing modality markers.  Adopting a descriptive design, the present study was carried out to compare the use of modality markers in terms...

the present paper sets out to investigate the syntactic category of persian modals, šâyad ‘perhaps’ and bâyad ‘must’. the syntactic category of the two modal elements has been viewed differently by different scholars. a number of scholars argue that both šâyad and bâyad are modal auxiliaries, while others claim that they both are modal adverbs. we propose that šâyad is a modal adverb and bâyad ...

one of the main dichotomies in syntactic analyses deals with the distinction between lexical and functional categories. functional categories gain in stature as the generative grammar moves ahead. they come into play in explaining the derivation stages of phrases and sentences. the present study critically evaluates different approaches to the role and function of one of these functional catego...

The current study attempted to investigate the effect of Systemic-Theoretical Instruction (STI) on English-language learners’ acquisition of the concepts of modal verbs through exploiting metaphors. To this end, the effect of the main treatment of the study, i.e. Concept-Based Instruction (CBI) was investigated through conceptual metaphors, in two gender (male vs. female) ...

In treating the subject of musical language, a Persian musician would be intrinsically drawn to the structural similarities between the Persian music and language. Indeed Persian music and language are extremely related in their metrics, intonations and structural phrases (syntax). Although we will draw upon this relationship, our aim in this article is to present “music as a language,” c...

This paper describes a model of the choice of modal verbs and modal particles. The choice mechanism does not require a modality-specific input as, e.g., a modal logical formula. Instead semantic (modal force) and pragmatic constraints (speech act marking) are applied to the available information on the whole and constrain the set of modal candidates to those that are appropriate in the respecti...

The article presents the experiments carried out as part of the participation in the pilot task (Modality and Negation)1 of QA4MRE@CLEF 2012. Modality and Negation are two main grammatical devices that allow to express extra-propositional aspects of meaning. Modality is a grammatical category that allows to express aspects related to the attitude of the speaker towards statements. Negation is a...

This paper describes ongoing work on the choice of modal expressions in the generation of recommendations about courses of study within the B.A.-program of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. We focus our work on the German modal verbs müssen (must), können (can), the subjunctive form sollte (should), and dürfen (may). The idea is to combine insights from formal semantics into the meaning of modal ver...

This work investigates the role of semantic clause types and modality in argumentative texts. We annotate argumentative microtexts with Situation Entity (SE) classes and additionately label the segments that contain modal verbs with their modal senses. We analyse both the correlation of SE classes and of modal verbs and senses with components of argument structures (such as premises and conclus...