Publications
Publication details [#41921]
Ferenc, Kiefer. 2000. Modality. In Östman, Jan-Ola, Jef Verschueren, Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen, eds. Handbook of Pragmatics. 1998 Installment. John Benjamins.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Annotation
This essay deals with modality, from a perspective according to which modality, related to necessity and possibility, is not necessarily propositional, but may also include nonpropositional sentential aspects. This choice presupposes a labor division between semantics and pragmatics. Roughly speaking, semantics deals with those aspects of meaning which are predictable on the basis of lexical meaning and sentence structure. Pragmatics, on the other hand, relates linguistic structure to contextual phenomena.