Lakhasly

Modal items are those which carry meanings referring to the degree of certainty (sometimes called epistemic modality) or necessity (deontic modality).The corpus statistics underscore this earlier work and provide compelling evidence of the ubiquity of modal items in everyday speech and writing.To argue that the domain of modality be expanded beyond the closed-class modal verbs is not a new idea; several linguists have advocated this, based on the frequent occurrence in written texts of a wider range of modal items (Holmes ????) or on sociolinguistic 'fieldwork' (Stubbs ????).Clearly the best candidates for such meanings in the ?,???-word list are the closed class of modal verbs (can, could, may, must, will, should, etc.

Modal items are those which carry meanings referring to the degree of certainty
(sometimes called epistemic modality) or necessity (deontic modality). A full list of such
items may be found in Carter and McCarthy (: –). Clearly the best candidates
for such meanings in the ,-word list are the closed class of modal verbs (can, could,
may, must, will, should, etc. – all of which are in band A), but the list contains other, nongrammatical,
very high frequency items that carry related meanings. These include lexical
modals such as the verbs look (A), seem (B) and sound (B), the adjectives possible (B) and
certain (B) and the adverbs maybe (A), probably (A), definitely (B), apparently (B) and possibly
(C). Some of these may strike teachers as more ‘intermediate’ level words, and yet their
frequency is so high in everyday communication that excluding them from the elementary
level would need some other justification (e.g. avoiding duplication of close synonyms and
economising on cognitive load). To argue that the domain of modality be expanded beyond
the closed-class modal verbs is not a new idea; several linguists have advocated this, based
on the frequent occurrence in written texts of a wider range of modal items (Holmes )
or on sociolinguistic ‘fieldwork’ (Stubbs ). The corpus statistics underscore this earlier
work and provide compelling evidence of the ubiquity of modal items in everyday speech
and writing.