Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of how epistemic modal meanings are expressed in the languages of the world. It first presents a survey of different types of epistemic modal expressions. Then some examples of morphosyntactic systems of epistemic modality are given. Next comes a discussion of different types of combinations of epistemic modal expressions. The section that follows deals with scope properties and with cross-linguistic tendencies pertaining to the ordering of grammatical epistemic modal expressions relative to other kinds of grammatical expressions. The final section is concerned with distributional characteristics of epistemic modal expressions in independent and dependent clauses.