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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 primary meaning would be the deontic meaning ("You are required to speak Spanish.") but this may be intended epistemically ("It is surely the case that you speak Spanish"). Epistemic modals can be analyzed as raising verbs, while deontic modals can be analyzed as control verbs. Epistemic usages of modals tend to develop from deontic usages. [4]
A speaker may use an echo question to seek confirmation because they find the stimulus surprising, or simply because they did not hear it clearly. Echo questions have unusual syntactic properties (including a lack of wh-movement ), which have made them a challenge to account for in linguistic theories of questions .
On the other hand, most words belong to more than one word class. For example, run can serve as either a verb or a noun (these are regarded as two different lexemes). [3] Lexemes may be inflected to express different grammatical categories. The lexeme run has the forms runs, ran, runny, runner, and running. [3]
Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rules, a subject that includes phonology, morphology, and syntax, together with phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to study grammar: traditional grammar and theoretical grammar.
In linguistics, syntax (/ ˈ s ɪ n t æ k s / SIN-taks) [1] [2] is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences.Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), [3] agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning ().
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However, it is sometimes used to mean "may" or "can". The most famous example of both of these uses of the word "shall" is the United States Constitution . Claims that "shall" is used to denote a fact, or is not used with the above different meanings, have caused discussions and have significant consequences for interpreting the text's intended ...