English Modality in Perspective

The analysis and theoretical description of modality may be grammar-centred, semantic- or pragmatic-oriented, and may refer to the content of the linguistic act, or to the contextual situation, or again to the interlocutors of the speech act itself. Such approaches are only some of the multiple perspectives – each one complementing the other – from which the kaleidoscopic modal system can be studied. The editors of this collection of papers bear all these perspectives in mind and focus their attention on specialized genres, on the one hand, and on the similarities to and differences from a few English modal expressions that are found in other languages, on the other. All the papers in this volume exhibit an interesting balance between theory and practice, in so much as they all make use of computerized linguistic corpora in order to test, confirm or disclaim previously illustrated theories or intuitions, or to provide ground for new hypotheses.