The set of English modal verbs is widely recognised 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 t...

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

According to Lightfoot (1979: 112), what is perhaps “most remarkable” about the reanalysis of the premodals is the subsequent development of a set of semantically identical but syntactically full verbs to fill the vacuum created. Lightfoot terms these verbs “quasimodals” and dates their appearance with modal meaning in the 15th century. I will question three of Lightfoot’s claims: the date of t...

The nonlinear system becomes an area with numerous investigations over the past decades. The conventional modal analysis could not be  applied on nonlinear continuous system which makes it impossible to construct the reduced order models and obtain system response based on limited number of measurement points. Nonlinear normal modes provide a useful tool for extending modal analysis to nonlinea...

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 article is an attempt first to introduce translation as a linguistic-cultural process, and then to seek the impact of the english language on persian modal auxiliaries. parallel corpora of persian translated and original texts derived from the area of educational psychology were analyzed based on the theoretical framework of house (1997, 2001). the results show us that although the discour...

This paper sets out to answer a fundamental question: ‘How do tutors hedge their comments using modal verbs?’ A total of 126 feedback reports comprising 35,941 words were collected from two Humanities departments in a UK higher education institution. Although this is a relatively small corpus, it is a specialised corpus. The research focuses on a specific genre – written feedback –, thus the fi...

The present contribution deals with the epistemic readings of the Italian modal verbs dovere ('must') and potere ('may'/'can'). The two verbs show striking differences — both quantitative and qualitative — with respect to the possibility of epistemic interpretation, differences which have gone so far completely unnoticed in the — rather scarce — semantic literature on modal verbs in Italian. Ev...

Complex predicates, or compound verbs, constitute a major portion of verbal forms in the Persian language. They are normally formed using a noun, adjective, preposition, or prepositional phrase, followed by a light verb. Unlike many other languages that employ such constructions, Persian allows the two components to become separated. This paper will investigate where complex predicates syntacti...