Modality

This book offers original theoretical accounts and a wealth of descriptive information concerning modality in present-day English. At the same time, it provides fresh impetus to more general linguisti

Since the publication of F. R. Palmer's Mood and Modality in 1986, when the topic of "modality" was fairly unfamiliar, there has been considerable interest in the subject as well as in grammatical typ

This volume explores the linguistic expression of modality in natural language from a cross-linguistic perspective. Modal expressions provide the basic tools that allow us to dissociate what we say fr

An extraordinary amount of recent work by philosophers of language, meta-ethicists, and semanticists has focused on the meaning and function of language expressing concepts having to do with what is a

Linguistics scholars based in Europe and the UK, the US, and Australia address various facets of core modality, peripheral modality, and evidentiality and modality in discourse. Fourteen contributions

"There is a lot we don't know. That means that there are a lot of possibilities that are, epistemically speaking, open. For instance, we don't know whether it rained in Seattle yesterday. So, for us a

At the September 2009 annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, in Lisbon, Portugal, Abraham and Leiss organized and convened a workshop on patterns of overt modality, and the 12 essays her

The philosophy of modality investigates necessity and possibility, and related notions--are they objective features of mind-independent reality? If so, are they irreducible, or can modal facts be exp

What do we mean when we say things like 'If only we knew what he was up to!' Clearly this is more than just a message, or a question to our addressee. We are expressing simultaneously that we don't know, and also that we wish to know. Several modes of encoding contribute to such modalities of expression: word order, subordinating subjunctions, sentences that are subordinated but nevertheless occur autonomously, and attitudinal discourse adverbs which, far beyond lexical adverbials of modality, allow the speaker and the listener to presuppose full agreement, partial agreement under presupposed conditions, or negotiation of common ground. This state of the art survey proposes a new model of modality, drawing on data from a variety of Germanic and Slavic languages to find out what is cross-linguistically universal about modality, and to argue that it is a constitutive part of human cognition.

This book explores graded expressions of modality, a rich and underexplored source of insight into modal semantics. Studies on modal language to date have largely focussed on a small and non-represent

This book is a cross-linguistic exploration of semantic and functional change in modal markers. Its approach is broadly functional typological but makes frequent reference to work in formal semantics

"This book explores the nature and scope of modality in Japanese. It contains a review of the history of Japanese modality studies, as well as theoretical and empirical research and is the first colle

Since antiquity, philosophy and rhetoric have traditionally been cast as rivals, with the former often lauded as a search for logical truth and the latter usually disparaged as empty speech. But in th

Perhaps no one has done more in the last 30 years to advance thinking in the metaphysics of modality than has Alvin Plantinga. Collected here are some of his most important essays on this influential

This book presents different approaches on multi-modality imaging with a focus on biomedical applications. Medical imaging can be divided into two categories: functional (related to physiological body

This handbook offers an in depth and comprehensive state of the art survey of the linguistic domains of modality and mood. An international team of experts in the field examine the full range of metho

Bott (studies in counseling and psychotherapy, U. of Brighton) and Howard, a psychotherapist, presents a cross-modality approach to psychotherapy, emphasizing psychodynamic and humanistic approaches.

Examines how modal notions such as permission and obligation interact with negation in a variety of languages, focusing on how ambiguities of scope are resolved. Demonstrates that languages overwhelmi

Evidentiality and Modality in European Languages focuses on discourse-pragmatic studies on the domains of evidentiality and epistemic modality, and also includes studies on deontic modality. The book

A Critical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Modality examines the eight main contemporary theories of possibility behind a central metaphysical topic. Covering modal skepticism, modal expressivism,

This book shows that the semantic analysis of modal notions of possibility and necessity can be used to enhance our understanding of the interpretation of reports of belief or emotional state. It introduces intuitive notation and terminology to express ideas in modern theories of modal interpretation that are normally represented in complex logical formulas, effectively updates the 1960s-era link between possible worlds and the semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions, and reconciles two disparate views of the role of events in semantic interpretation, that of Donald Davidson and that of David Lewis. It reduces a host of variable behaviors of propositional attitude ascription to an intuitive and precise distinction between ascriptions that merely express a commitment to propositional content versus ones that attribute a mental state to the holder of the propositional attitude. This leads to an explanation of the nature and effects of the language disorder of fluent aphasia.

This book brings together novel work on the semantics and pragmatics of certain indefinite expressions that also convey modality. These epistemic indefinites are determiners or pronouns that signal ig

Suppose that God exists: what difference would that make to the world? The answer depends on the nature of God and the nature of the world. In this book, William E. Mann argues in one new and sixteen

Since the ground-breaking work of Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and others in the 1960s and 70s, one dominant interest of analytic philosophers has been in modal truths, which concern the question what is

This book introduces essential advances in acupuncture studies using multi-modality neuroimaging, which provides insights into how specific brain networks are involved in acupuncture effects in humans

In this volume, the author investigates and argues for, a particular answer to the question: What is the right way to logically analyze modalities from natural language within formal languages? The an

Individual objects have potentials: paper has the potential to burn, an acorn has the potential to turn into a tree, some people have the potential to run a mile in less than four minutes. Barbara Vet

The Actual and the Possible presents new essays by leading specialists on modality and the metaphysics of modality in the history of modern philosophy from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.

In this collective volume, some of the leading experts in the field explore aspects of linguistic variation and change in one of the core areas of Ancient Greek grammar: tense, aspect, and modality.

Stroke is one of the leading causes of death in the world, resulting mostly from the sudden ruptures of atherosclerosis carotid plaques. Understanding why and how plaque develops and ruptures requires

This volume presents strongly empirical, corpus-based studies of a range of English modal auxiliaries and modal constructions in specific uses. It also approaches some of the classic issues in the fie

In this book, Richard Brian Davis explores various attempts to solve the Dependence Problem - the problem posed by the following question: How can necessary truths stand to God in a one-way relation o