This paper investigates the properties and text distribution of English modal auxiliaries, especially will, in construction with be + -ing (as in I’ll be leaving tomorrow, You should be going) in recent and present day English. Constructions of this kind are said to have some unusual aspectual and other semantic properties, quite against the grain of “regular” uses of the progressive. I conside...

These contrasts are typically thought to involve licensing conditions that the environment to the left of the ellipsis invoke. The contrast between (4a) and (4b), for instance, indicates that the ellipsis site must be in construction with, or perhaps governed by, a member of “Aux,” where these can be understood to be just those terms that are able occupy the highest of the functional projection...

This work presents a method of learning modal auxiliaries. In our method, two consecutive uses of modals are given as example sentences. These are beneficial for learners to recognize the flow of thought in context. We also present a method of extracting example sentences from a corpus. Here sentences in the corpus are parsed and analyzed to extract only the main clauses, which are essential pa...

This squib presents two puzzles related to an ambiguity found in For-infinitival relative clauses (FIRs). FIR’s always receive a modal interpretation even in the absence of any overt modal verb, and the modal interpretation seems to come in two distinct types, which can be paraphrased by finite relative clauses employing, respectively, the modal auxiliaries should and could. The two puzzles pre...

1. Modal logic Modal notions are pervasive in the meaning of a wide range of expressions from grammatical categories, such as tenses, to the lexical semantics of particular words, such as modal adverbials (probably, necessarily) and modal auxiliaries (must, may, can). The best known modalities are the alethic 1 modalities necessary and possible. Other modalities include temporal, de-ontic, epis...

We claim that weak necessity modals like English "should" are referential expressions denote pluralities of worlds, against the standard analysis, according to which all modal auxiliaries quantifiers. Weak pattern plural definites when tested for homogeneity effects (Löbner 2000, Križ 2016): they have scopeless readings under negation, tolerate exceptions in certain discourse contexts, and exhi...

I begin here in §1 with some prima facie linguistic difficulties had by two prominent metaethical accounts of the meaning of normative terms – basically the accounts implicit in realism and expressivism – when these are applied in a straightforward albeit naïve way to the word ‘ought’. In §2, I explain what I take to be the standard framework in theoretical semantics for accounting for the sema...

This paper presents a comprehensive description of non-finite verbs in Assamese, language that belongs to the Indo-Aryan family. Non-finite exist multi-verb constructions, which include both single and multi-clausal constructions. In clauses, they occur with different auxiliaries carry various aspectual modal meanings. on other hand, dependent clauses mark syntactic relations have main clause. ...