This chapter offers an overview of the essentials of the cognitive-functional view adopted in the book, and situates the approach in the wider field of language studies, notably relative to the cognitive linguistic and functional linguistic traditions. It also introduces the general theoretical issues of concern in the book: it highlights the importance in language research of an active concern with conceptualization, and of assuming a dynamic relationship between conceptual and linguistic structures and processes (i.e. between meaning and form), and it points out the different practices in this regards in the strands of cognitive and functional linguistics. Finally, it presents the rudiments of a model called Functional Procedural Grammar, which serves as guide and blackboard throughout the book, and which is elaborated further in the course of it.

The title of this book is deliberately ambiguous. Shared by both readings is the notion of modality, referring to a prominent semantic concept in the study of language use. The ambiguity resides in the alternation between a general and a more specific reading of the title. In the general reading, the title indicates that the notion of modality is used as a source of inspiration for exploring wider perspectives. In the more specific reading, the title suggests a concern with the position of modality in the human mind. Both readings apply to this book, and the specific reading refers to just one, albeit crucial, element of the wider perspectives implied in the general reading.

This chapter takes the discussion in the preceding one a few steps further, by offering an alternative analysis embedded in, and motivated by, the wider perspective of the hierarchy of qualificational categories. Central is the concept of ‘attitudes,’ covering a distinctive group of dimensions in the hierarchy involving types of speaker assessments of a state of affairs. This includes deontic and epistemic modality, but also inferential evidentiality and boulomaic attitude. It excludes dynamic modality, however, which is considered to belong in a different group of qualificational dimensions along with time and quantificational aspect. The chapter moreover explores further the nature and properties of the group of attitudinal dimensions, with focus on the issue of their status as part of the conceptual system. It does so by zooming in on the difference between performative and descriptive uses typical of the attitudinal categories, and by exploring co-occurrence restrictions which turn out to exist between these categories.

Continuing the exploration of categories related to the attitudinal ones, yet going beyond them, this chapter focuses primarily on the concept of subjectivity, and secondarily on the related concept of mirativity. It revisits the distinction between subjective and objective modality as it is traditionally made in the literature. It offers an alternative analysis in terms of the concept of subjectivity vs. intersubjectivity. It also considers the relationship between (inter)subjectivity, as relevant for the attitudinal categories, and two other major notions of subjectivity, notably Traugott’s and Langacker’s. It argues that these different concepts concern different phenomena, although all of them are relevant for the domain of the attitudinal categories. The chapter moreover explores the status of (inter)subjectivity relative to the qualificational hierarchy. It thereby draws in mirativity, as a semantically similar dimension. And it reconsiders the status of experienced, hearsay and memory, as dimensions that share some relevant characteristics with (inter)subjectivity and mirativity.

This chapter defines the most important basic notions and concepts figuring in the analysis of the system of qualifications of states of affairs and their expression in language, as they are used in the book. It defines the semantic categories figuring in the domain of qualifications of states of affairs (often called TAM categories), often in a preliminary fashion as some of them are elaborated or modified in later chapters. It introduces the notion of a hierarchy present in the system of qualificational dimensions, accounting for their semantic scope properties – an analytical concept central in the book. It moreover discusses the notion of a ‘semantic paradigm,’ as a system of expressive devices for a single qualificational category in which each member has slightly different functional characteristics, and it motivates the correlated function-to-form approach adopted in the study for analyzing qualificational categories and their expressions. The chapter moreover does some groundwork for the theoretical issue of the position of the hierarchical system in cognition, arguing that it is conceptual, not linguistic, in nature.

The last words about the field of modality/the attitudes, the qualificational system and its embedding in a cognitive grammar, and the cognitive-functional approach in the analysis of language, have not been spoken yet. Hopefully, this book will offer sufficient food for thought and will be a source for fruitful further discussion on all these matters.

This chapter returns to the theoretical concerns of the study, and to the principles at the heart of a cognitive-functional approach to modeling the cognitive processes in language use. Central are the basic principles of depth and dynamism, and the three issues emerging from them when comparing cognitive and traditional functionalist approaches in current linguistics: the (non)concern with conceptualization in linguistic analysis, the processual vs. representationalist concept of grammar, and the complex meaning-form relationship. The chapter rounds up and reflects on what the analyses of the attitudinal and other semantic and functional dimensions in the preceding chapters have shown with relevance to these principles and issues. Moreover, it uses these insights to dwell on wider implications, beyond the analysis of the qualificational dimensions, for our understanding of the cognitive systems involved in language use.

This and the next chapter deal with a number of notions and forms of which the linguistic or semantic status is or can be disputed, but which in the present analysis are considered non-attitudinal. The present chapter deals with the notions of directivity, volition and intention, which are argued to be action related, hence to pertain to the cognitive domain of communication planning. It also reanalyzes the concept of evidentiality, arguing for a very different cognitive status of inferentiality, as an attitudinal category, on the one hand, and on the other hand of the traditional categories of hearsay and experience, as well as of a less traditional category called ‘memory.’

This and the next chapter together offer a reanalysis of the semantic domain covered by the traditional notion of modality. On the basis of a scrutiny of the characteristics of the individual qualificational categories involved, they propose a view of the organization of the field that differs from earlier analyses in the literature. The present chapter focuses on the definition of the traditional modal subcategories: dynamic, deontic and epistemic modality. It discusses the differences of the present approach with classical conceptions of the categories in the literature. The chapter moreover critically reviews alternative divisions of (parts of) the field proposed earlier, and it surveys and deconstructs the most important traditional arguments for covering the three semantic categories in one (super)category of modality.