Stephen Anderson

Traditionally, modality has been almost exclusively investigated with modal auxiliaries. I will illustrate the role of modality in producing microvariation in all areas of semantics. Modality with its many different flavors is everywhere in the verbal projection spine: sublexically, with voice, aspect, tense, mood, and complementizers. It’s also at the core of sentential complementation, and it provides crucial parameters of variation for indefinites, too. I ask: why is that?