All Questions
Tagged with modal-verbs english
12 questions
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Why does English distinguish between 'must' and 'have to', particularly in the negative?
In English, there's a (minor) semantic difference between 'must' and 'have to', particularly when negated. For example, 'you must do this' and 'you have to do this' mean roughly the same thing, but '...
- 479
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The acceptability of verbal phrase ellipsis and subject-auxiliary inversion in triple modal sentences
I have been researching on multiple modal constructions, which is a feature used in the Southern United States. Unlike Standard English, this dialect allows more than one modal auxiliary per clause.
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- 724
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3
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Do modal auxiliaries in English never change their forms?
Anderson's Essentials of Linguistics says that in English:
The modal auxiliaries never change their form: they occupy the T-
head position in their own right.
The non-modal auxiliaries, like main ...
- 683
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Why are modal verbs in English defective?
Modal verbs exist in many languages; but they are often defective. English is an extreme example where they seem to only have present tense forms; and have no gerund, participle, or infinitive; some ...
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How can we say modals are of category T, but auxiliaries are really verbs? [duplicate]
Are there any arguments or theories to account for it?
- 31.1k
-1
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Is it a causative morpheme or a modal morpheme?
Let us take the verb 'get', we can say both:
1- Someone gets to take something
2- Someone gets someone to take something
In the 1st sentence, 'get' is a modal morpheme, but in the other sentence '...
- 2,785
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5
answers
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Are English modal verbs tensed or non-tensed?
My assumption: English modal verbs are non-tensed (i.e. we don't say shoulds or shoulded).
Yet, in X' bar theory, modal verbs appear under the inflection node I', precisely where we find the ...
CommunityBot
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How can I write subject and predicate phrases so they can be interchanged for a multiple-choice test and still have subject-verb agreement?
I’m trying to write a large set of multiple-choice test questions that can easily be randomized by interchanging their subject phrases and predicate phrases. I’m having some difficulty finding verbs ...
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Distinguishing between epistemic and circumstantial readings (without recourse to temporality)?
How can you/should you empirically distinguish between epistemic and circumstantial readings of modals?
I (at least think I) understand how the two readings are supposed to be distinguished ...
- 6,337
6
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1
answer
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Epistemic modality inside deontic scope?
I was taught (according to Role and Reference Grammar) that epistemic modality applies at clause level while deontic modality applies at core level. So in theory a sentence which has both would have ...
- 6,337
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4
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Are modal verbs lexical or grammatical categories?
Are modal verbs, such as must and can, considered lexical or grammatical categories?
- 6,337
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What type of modality is "You must not fear"?
Someone challenged me to translate the phrase "You must not fear" into my conlang, and I was stumped, because I couldn't pin down the modality of the phrase. I came up with a phrase meaning "You are ...
CommunityBot
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