Modal Sentences

Building on the logical tradition of possible world semantics this innovative book explores the rich and diverse empirical domain of modality in language offering an ambitious theory of linguistic modality as indicative of uncertainty. It covers a wide variety of languages ranging from English Greek Italian and French to Native American and Asian languages and studies modals alongside evidentials questions and imperatives to enable a deeper understanding of modality. The authors introduce a new analysis of linguistic necessity as conveying evidential bias identifying new categories such as flexible necessity modals and offering a framework for the linguistic category of evidentiality as a branch of epistemic modality. They also study the relationship between questions and modals through the concepts of nonveridical equilibrium reflection and evidential bias. Laying out the formal semantic tools step-by-step it is essential reading for both scholars and students of semantics philosophy computational linguistics typology and communication theory.