THE MEANING OF MODALITY
In the sentence It is raining the speaker expresses a proposition and at the same time commits himself to the truth of that proposition. However, if he says It may be raining, It can’t be raining, It must be raining, he is not committing himself whole-heartedly to the truth of the proposition, but he is rather modifying his commitment to some degree by expressing a judgement or assessment to the truth of the situation. This is an important choice which speakers face every time they formulate a declarative clause.
For these considerations, modality is to be understood as a semantic category which covers such notions as possibility, probability, necessity, volition, obligation, ability or permission. These are the basic modalities; however, the concept of modality has been extended to cover other notions such as doubt, wish, regret or desire. Any of these notions indicates that the speaker is presenting the content of a proposition not as a simple assertion of a fact but rather coloured by personal attitude:
That man over there is the President (assertion)
That man over there may be / can’t possibly be / could perhaps be the President (modalised assertion).
There are two main types of modality:
* Intrinsic / non-epistemic: modals which express possibility, obligation, ability and volition, which involve some kind of intrinsic human control over events.
* Extrinsic / epistemic: modals which express possibility, necessity and probability, which do not primarily involve human control of events but do typically involve human judgement of what is or is not likely to happen.
The Realisations of Modal Meanings
Modal meanings can be realised by both verbal and non-verbal items. By the latter we mean modal disjuncts (make comments on the rest of the sentence) (probably, possibly, surely, hopefully), modal adjectives (possible, probably, likely), modal nouns (possibility, probability, likelihood), non-assertive items (any), fall-rise intonation or hesitation.
In this thread, we will only focus on the former, where we find the modal auxiliaries.
General Characteristics of Modal Auxiliaries
It is time now to move into the explanation of the other three categories of auxiliary verbs. However, it is quite relevant to introduce beforehand the main features regarding modals, semi-modals and lexical auxiliaries:
1) In first place, they express a variety of moods or attitudes towards an action, which is known as modality.
2) They have no inflexion for the third person singular, except for have to and those lexical auxiliaries that begin with the verb be.
3) They cannot co-occur in a verb phrase, that is, you cannot say *You should can. Nevertheless, some regional or dialectical variation allows combinations such as might could or might should.
4) Since they express moods or attitudes they may vary from one region to another, as we have seen before, thus increasing somehow its difficulty. Nevertheless, they tend to follow a series of standard behaviours that we will see later on.
5) They have not got any non-finite form; for example, you cannot say *to can, or *musting or even *canned.
6) These types of auxiliaries are followed in the verb phrase by a bare infinitive, for example: She should visit the door. However, we find some exceptions as it is the case of have to, ought to, used to and the lexical auxiliaries that follow this structure be bound to / apt to / likely to, etc.
Once stated the fundamental features characterising modals, semi-modals and lexical auxiliaries, we are going to centre our attention on modal auxiliaries.
Find below a picture that summarizes the main uses of each modal verb.
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