Words and worlds

Modality is a subject that has attracted increasing attention over the last decade or so. In English, and to a lesser extent in German, there is a class of syntactically restricted auxiliary verbs that is primarily associated with modal concepts. Following on from work presented in his Edinburgh PhD-thesis and suggestions made in Lyons' Semantics (1977), the author discusses the differences between modal logic and linguistic modality, and then examines what kind of verbal expression, whether auxiliary or not, can reflect the various modality parameters. A chapter each is devoted to epistemic, «logical», deontic, dynamic-dispositional, and bouletic modality, and to how modality interacts with sentence type. The discussion mainly concerns English, but with a number of side-glances at German. In a final chapter, the author sets up semantic specifications for the modal auxiliaries in the light of his findings in previous chapters.