The present study assessed children's knowledge of how speakers use modal auxiliaries such as might and have to to indicate their degree of belief in the truth of their statements (epistemic modality), and to socially regulate behavior (deontic modality). We also considered whether modals comprise a semantic system that is progressively attained in a way similar to other semantic systems. Child...

Research on the interpretation of adverbs such as really, just, only, rather, quite, apparently or absolutely shows that they are contextually sensitive and highly flexible. This paper takes a closer look at really in order to account for its various interpretations. Stenström’s (1986) work on really forms the starting-point for the investigation. The following examples are from Stenström (1986...

Evidentiality or, following the French linguistic tradition, “mediativity” is a complex and controversial category, with an already extensive body of literature devoted to other languages few studies focusing on Portuguese. As conceptual abstracting away from its means expression, which some extent present in such as Portuguese that lack specific grammatical system for codification, evidentiali...

In addition to its use in plain future assertions, gaa is also used to make epistemic modal claims that lack future orientation. (2a) is an epistemic modal claim with present temporal orientation. The indicative non-modal counterpart of (2a) is (2b). In (2a) the auxiliary bears subjunctive mood morphology and the particle gaa, whereas in (2b) the present indicative auxiliary hai is used. The fe...

The article reveals linguistic aspect of modality in modern math discourse English, critically outlines a number actual problematic issues the area, such as distinction between epistemic and evidentiality marked by formal logics philosophical grounding. General reference to previous scholarly activity research proves that it is largely based on propositional aspects meaning. text corpus analysi...

This paper details the method used to augment an epistemic modality corpus (the Bioscope corpus), incorporating results from the lexical and syntactic analysis of its sentences. The features resulting from these analyses were consolidated in a single data structure, that can be used for interactive experimentation on the corpus. Some visualization aids developed for corpus browsing are also des...

English. We have produced a corpus annotated for modality which amounts to approximately 20,000 words in English, French, and Italian. The annotation scheme is based on the notion of epistemic construction and virtually languageindependent. The annotation is rigorously evaluated by means of a newly developed strategy based on the alignment of the entire epistemic constructions as identified and...

The use of evidential and epistemic marking as a rhetorical strategy has received little attention in the literature. Speakers often make judgments on the basis of perceptual, reported, or inferred evidence, thus the relationship between epistemicity and evidentiality is often close and difficult to demarcate. However, whereas epistemicity involves the speaker’s or writer’s evaluation, judgment...

Most linguists contend that epistemic markers for source-of-information also encode the speaker's assessment of the reliability of that information. Their claim tacitly questions the utility of source-of-information marking and its validity, which depends on the ability to distinguish source-of-information from speaker-attitude marking. I argue that the source of information has a distinct func...