Modal verbs from a crosslinguistic perspective

Abstract

This paper analyses modal verbs in selected languages in terms of their morphological and syntactic properties. It deals in detail with English modal verbs, demonstrating that they form quite a homogenous group. Furthermore, the paper explores properties of modal verbs in other languages (Germanic, Slavonic, Romance, Hungarian, Balto-Finnic, Turkic and Chinese), demonstrating that, contrary to their English counterparts, modals in the majority of languages form quite heterogeneous groups with respect to their morphological and syntactic properties, such as conjugation, subcategorization and agreement. In other words, the paper demonstrates that the category of modal verbs cannot be crosslinguistically based on formal grounds. The paper also shows that modal verbs are found predominantly in Indo-European languages, whereas other languages frequently employ other grammatical means to express modal meanings.