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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.
The following sentences illustrate epistemic and deontic uses of the English modal verb must: epistemic: You must be starving. ("I think it is almost a certainty that you are starving.") deontic: You must leave now. ("You are required to leave now.") An ambiguous case is You must speak Spanish.
The 'must' in this sentence thus expresses epistemic modality: "'for all we know', Agatha must be the murderer", where 'for all we know' is relative to some knowledge the speakers possess. In contrast, (2) might be spoken by someone who has decided that, according to some standard of conduct, Agatha has committed a vile crime, and therefore the ...
The English modal verbs consist of the core modals can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would, as well as ought (to), had better, and in some uses dare and need. [20] These do not inflect for person or number, [ 20 ] do not occur alone, and do not have infinitive or participle forms (except synonyms, as with be/being/been able (to ...
By contrast, generative theories generally provide performance-based explanations for the oddness of center embedding sentences like one in (2). According to such explanations, the grammar of English could in principle generate such sentences, but doing so in practice is so taxing on working memory that the sentence ends up being unparsable ...
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. [1] [2]: 181 [3] That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying (for example, a statement of fact, of desire, of command, etc.).
These do not add -s for the third-person singular, and they do not form infinitives or participles; the only inflection they undergo is that to a certain extent could, might, should and would (and sometimes dared) function as preterites (past tenses) of can, may, shall and will (and dare) respectively.
This statistical model defines a similarity metric, whereby sentences which are more like those within a corpus in certain respects are assigned higher values than sentences less alike. Pereira's model assigns an ungrammatical version of the same sentence a lower probability than the syntactically well-formed structure demonstrating that ...