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.