Scope and semimodal verbs: two approaches In this paper I focus on scope phenomena connected with semimodal (and modal) verbs and mainly on the syntactic behaviour of these groups of verbs. One important question is: why can semimodal verbs (and modal verbs in epistemic use) not have perfect and future tense forms? Taking among other things Reichenbach’s tense system as a starting point I try t...

mood is, in general, a meaning concept that indicates the speaker’s point of view about a proposition. there are different modal elements in each language to embody a mood; in other words, different languages have variety of methods to express modal concepts. using verbal moods is one of these methods. verbal mood represents the morphology of a verb and can hence be considered as a grammatical ...

In recent work it has been demonstrated by various scholars that the use of modal verbs has changed in past decades (Krug 2000, Leech 2003, Smith 2003, and especially Leech et al. 2009). In earlier work Close and Aarts (2010) and Aarts, Close and Wallis (forthcoming) looked at the changing use of the modal and semimodal auxiliaries in spoken English. While the results of these investigations ar...

marine industry requires continued development of new technologies in order to produce oil. an essential requirement in design is to be able to compare experimental data from prototype structures with predicted information from a corresponding analytical finite element model. in this study, structural model updating may be defined as the fit of an existing analytical model in the light of measu...

is paper investigates existing proposals for the apparent correlation between modal flavour and temporal orientation, through the lens of attitude verbs. Work thus far has focussed on modal auxiliaries, but attitude verbs with modal-quantificational analyses can shed new light on understanding the temporal orientation of modals elements. Landau (2000) notes that complements of partial control a...

suhrawardi’s logic of the hikmat al-ishraq is basically modal. so to understand his modal logic one first has to know the non-modal part upon which his modal logic is built. in my previous paper ‘suhrawardi on syllogisms’(3) i discussed the former in detail. the present paper is an exposition of his treatment of modal syllogisms. on the basis of some reasonable existential presuppositions and a...

This paper reports the results of an eye-tracking during reading experiment carried out in order to investigate the online processing of the French modal verbs devoir ("must") and pouvoir ("can/may"). The nature – ambiguous/homonymic, polysemous or monosemic/under-specified – of the modals is tested through the manipulation in sentences of the root or epistemic meaning of the modal as well as t...

this study compares and contrasts tense and inherent aspect in english and persian lan-guage from a semantic and syntactic point of view. the aspectual verb system in both english and persian are semantically interpreted alike. however, in persian a group of stative verbs are grammaticalized by the imperfective obligatory morpheme mi-, while in english all sta-tive verbs perfective. furthermore...

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...