Tense and Modals

Abstract

The class of true modal verbs in English is usually understood to include auxiliary verbs conveying possibility and necessity (including predictive future) that lack non-finite morphological forms; from a syntactic perspective, these verbs occur only in finite clauses (as opposed to infinitives or gerunds). Nevertheless the true modals do not inflect for third-person singular agreement, unlike normal present-tense verbs. When they are negated, true modals always precede the negative particle not, regardless of their understood scope relative to negation, and never give rise to do-support

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Citations of this work

Abilities.John Maier - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
On the event relativity of modal auxiliaries.Valentine Hacquard - 2010 - Natural Language Semantics 18 (1):79-114.
Epistemic Modality De Re.Seth Yalcin - 2015 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 2:475-527.
On the interaction of aspect and modal auxiliaries.Valentine Hacquard - 2009 - Linguistics and Philosophy 32 (3):279-315.

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References found in this work

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.Noam Chomsky - 1965 - Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.Ann S. Ferebee - 1965 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 35 (1):167.
Sequence of tense and temporal de re.Dorit Abusch - 1997 - Linguistics and Philosophy 20 (1):1-50.

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