In this paper we try to contribute to the body of knowledge about the acquisition of English epistemic modal verbs (e.g. Mary may/has to be at school). Semantically, these verbs encode possibility or necessity with respect to available evidence. Pragmatically, the use of epistemic modals often gives rise to scalar conversational inferences (Mary may be at school -> Mary doesn’t have to be at sc...

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...

The interest in Malaysian English generated many studies on focusing various grammatical features. However, modality is still under-researched, especially post-independence and new Englishes contexts. As a variety of English, it raises questions how has developed from the historical input variety, i.e., British resistant or accepting to American which highly influential globally. This study aim...

Hedging academic claims has been recognized as one of integral pragmatic features of academic writing in which most EFL academic writers seem to face substantial problems. Explicit instruction has been proposed by some scholars as an effective approach to make EFL writers aware of the importance, different forms, and pragmatic functions of hedging devices some of which are polysemous and polypr...

This two-part article critically reviews eight recent works in the field of mood and modality. Part I explores three different theoretical approaches – generative, cognitive–pragmatic, and typological – with the main focus on languages other than English. Within the framework of generative grammar, research issues include: the epistemic-root interpretations of modal verbs; transitive–intransiti...

The use of corpus-based findings in order to inform L2 teaching materials have been emphasized by many researchers owing to the fact that the studies of authentic texts have revealed some inconsistencies between the use of grammatical structures in corpora, and those found in language textbooks that are based purely on hunch. Therefore, by comparing a textbook corpus with the British National C...

This paper is concerned with some aspects of the semantics of modal verbs in English, in particular the phenomenon of modal subordination and the constraints on interpretation of successive modal sentences in a discourse. I propose a solution in the framework of dynamic semantics. The information state is taken to be a set of possibilities which are classiied according to the modal options extr...

Dil, küresel varlığımızı bir arada tutan zamktır. Şiir ve yazılarla ufukta ilk kez ortaya görünen İngilizce; modern dönemdeki lingua franca (ortak dil)’dir. Disiplinler arası boyutuyla bilim dalı olan dilbilim, sadece dilleri değil, aynı zamanda Kürtçe Türkçe gibi eski dillere de uygulanmaktadır tüm kapsamaktadır. Bu bağlamda, üç dili karşılaştırmak makuldür. çalışma, dilin başlangıç noktası ol...