Modality Across Syntactic Categories

This volume explores the linguistic expression of modality in natural language from a cross-linguistic perspective. Modal expressions provide the basic tools that allow us to dissociate what we say from what is actually going on, allowing us to talk about what might happen or might have happened, as well as what is required, desirable, or permitted. Chapters in the book demonstrate that modality involves many more syntactic categories and levels of syntactic structure than traditionally assumed. The volume distinguishes between three types of modality: 'low modality', which concerns modal interpretations associated with the verbal and nominal cartographies in syntax; 'middle modality', or modal interpretation associated with the syntactic cartography internal to the clause; and 'high modality', relating to the left periphery. It combines cross-linguistic discussions of the more widely studied sources of modality with analyses of novel or unexpected sources, and shows how the meanings associated with the three types of modality are realized across a wide range of languages.

Ana Arregui is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Ottawa. Her research is in the domain of natural language semantics, focusing on modality, tense, and aspect. Her publications include articles in Natural Language Semantics, Journal of Semantics, and Linguistics and Philosophy. She holds a Licenciatura en Letras from the University of Buenos Aires and a Ph.D in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
María Luisa Rivero is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Ottawa, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Her research has focused on syntax and semantics, most recently paying particular attention to aspect, modality, and tense, with emphasis on languages of the Romance and Slavic families and those of the Balkan peninsula.
Andrés Salanova is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Ottawa. His research has concentrated on the structure of Mebengokre, a Jê language spoken in central Brazil, and his publications have looked at topics ranging from phonology to the semantics of aspect in that language. He has conducted field research in central Brazil since 1996, and is more broadly interested in the history and ethnography of the South American lowlands.

- 1: Ana Arregui, María Luisa Rivero, and Andrés Salanova: Introduction
- Part I: Low Modality
- 2: Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Paula Menéndez-Benito: Epistemic indefinites: On the content and distribution of the epistemic component
- 3: Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Junko Shimoyama: Modal indefinites: Where do Japanese wh-kas fit in?
- 4: Ilaria Frana: Modality in the nominal domain: The case of adnominal conditionals
- 5: David-Étienne Bouchard: The non-modality of opinion verbs
- 6: Fabienne Martin and Florian Schäfer: Sublexical modality in defeasible causative verbs
- 7: Aynat Rubinstein: Straddling the line between attitude verbs and necessity modals
- 8: Igor Yanovich: May under verbs of hoping: Evolution of the modal system in the complements of hoping verbs in Early Modern English
- Part II: Middle Modality
- 9: Bronwyn M. Bjorkman and Claire Halpert: In an imperfect world: Deriving the typology of counterfactual marking
- 10: Remus Gergel: Dimensions of variation in Old English modals
- Part III: High Modality
- 11: Ana Arregui, María Luisa Rivero, and Andrés Salanova: Aspect and tense in evidentials
- 12: Sihwei Chen, Vera Hohaus, Rebecca Laturnus, Meagan Louie, Lisa Matthewson, Hotze Rullmann, Ori Simchen, Claire K. Turner, and Jozina Vander Klok: Past possibility cross-linguistically: Evidence from twelve languages
- 13: Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou: A modest proposal for the meaning of imperatives
- References
- Index