in the present paper, we are to put forth a paradigm for the systematic study of modality in persian.with this end in view, we consider modality as a linguistic phenomenon that can be expressed at the level of sentence, at the level of constituents smaller than sentence and/or at the level of discourse. in such a system where sentential modality, sub-sentential modality and discourse modality a...

Three age groups were tested for their understanding of present and past tense in the auxiliaries will and did, copula be, and progressive be. Children saw scenarios or pictures and responded to an experimenter’s “show-me” requests based on the tense— non-past or past—of the verb in the request. For two groups (sixty-four 2and sixty-four 3-year-olds), some children also heard temporal adverbs. ...

In this article we are going to trace the transition of modal verbs into epistemic adverbs. This development found in nearly all European languages will be analysed on the basis of Russian možet (byt’) which goes back to the third person singular present tense of the modal verb moč’ plus infinitive. In our study we shall focus on the constructional aspects of this language change with the aim t...

Sandro Zucchi Dipartimento di Scienze della Comunicazione Università di Salerno One difference between the Italian Sign Language sentences in (1)-(3) below and their English translations is that, while the English predicates are inflected for tense, the sign for the verb in Italian Sign Language (LIS) appears in its citational form: (1) GIANNI HOUSE BUY “Gianni is buying a house” (2) TIME-AGO G...

Many languages allow for ”fake” uses of their past tense marker: the marker can occur in certain contexts without conveying temporal pastness. Instead it appears to bear a modal meaning. Iatridou [2000] has coined this phenomenon Fake Tense. Fake Tense is particularly common to conditional construction. This paper proposes to explain Fake Tense in English conditional sentences as a certain kind...

in contrast to the grammatical category of mood in persian which has been subject to a number of studies, modality as a semantic category has not received the due attention it deserves. this study is fascinated to depict modal functions of tense in persian. in a sense, it tries to take account of the structures used by persian speakers to express their evaluation of the state of affairs. the re...

This paper is about some peculiarities of temporal deixis (indicated in French by temporal adverbs like maintenant, aujourd’hui, hier, demain, etc.) in narratives, that is, either in sentences which clearly are narrative, because of the presence of the passé simple tense in French, or in sentences which express the subjectivity of a third person point of view through represented speech or thoug...

The current work investigated whether differences in phonological overlap between the past- and present-tense forms of regular and irregular verbs can account for the graded neurophysiological effects of verb regularity observed in past-tense priming designs. Event-related potentials were recorded from sixteen healthy participants who performed a lexical-decision task in which past-tense primes...

this paper attempts to indicate that the two conceptual categories of evidentiality and epistemic modality are distinct although they may look similar; thus their corresponding adverbs also consist of separate subcategories of adverbs. to attain this goal, different data were gathered both from written and spoken sources and analyzed mostly with the help of semantic considerations in the framew...