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The English modal auxiliaries: from lexical semantics to utterance interpretation1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Alex Klinge
Alex Klinge
Affiliation:
Department of English, The Copenhagen Business School, 15 Dalgas Have, DK-2000 Frederiksberg C, Denmark.
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Extract

Like so many others before it, this exposition is of the meaning of the English modal auxiliaries, which are found in utterances conveying modal meanings such as ability, possibility and permission. However, unlike the majority of its predecessors, the present rendering admits to being about more than semantics. With the five central modal auxiliaries, can, may, must, will and shall, the modals for short, as a point of departure, a framework will be formulated to shed light on some central aspects of the immense cotext and context sensitivity involved in the meaning of utterances of sentences containing a modal auxiliary.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , September 1993 , pp. 315 - 357
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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