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The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. [a] They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms [b]) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.
For example, the inferred certainty sense of English must developed after the strong obligation sense; the probabilistic sense of should developed after the weak obligation sense; and the possibility senses of may and can developed later than the permission or ability sense. Two typical sequences of evolution of modal meanings are:
Modal auxiliary verbs, such as the English words may, can, must, ought, will, shall, need, dare, might, could, would, and should, are often used to express modality, especially in the Germanic languages. Ability, desirability, permission, obligation, and probability can all be exemplified by the usage of auxiliary modal verbs in English:
An auxiliary verb (abbreviated aux) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a participle, which respectively provide the main semantic content of the clause. [1]
Multiple choice items consist of a stem and several alternative answers. The stem is the opening—a problem to be solved, a question asked, or an incomplete statement to be completed. The options are the possible answers that the examinee can choose from, with the correct answer called the key and the incorrect answers called distractors. [4]
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For example, it might be metaphysically necessary, as some who advocate physicalism have thought, that all thinking beings have bodies [10] and can experience the passage of time. Saul Kripke has argued that every person necessarily has the parents they do have: anyone with different parents would not be the same person.
The auxiliary verbs could and might can also be used to indicate the conditional mood, as in the following: If the opportunity were here, I could do the job. (= ... I would be able to do ... ) If the opportunity were here, I might do the job. (= ... maybe I would do ...) Forms with would may also have "future-in-the-past" meaning: