Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
English modal verbs
Summary
The English modal verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality (properties such as possibility, obligation, etc.). They can be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participle or infinitive forms) and by their neutralization (that they do not take the ending -(e)s in the third-person singular).
The principal English modal verbs are can, could, may, might, shall, should, will, would, and must. Certain other verbs are sometimes classed as modals; these include ought, had better, and (in certain uses) dare and need. Verbs which share only some of the characteristics of the principal modals are sometimes called "quasi-modals", "semi-modals", or "pseudo-modals".
The verbs customarily classed as modals in English have the following properties:
They do not inflect (in the modern language) except insofar as some of them come in present–past (present–preterite) pairs. They do not add the ending -(e)s in the third-person singular (the present-tense modals therefore follow the preterite-present paradigm).
They are defective: they are not used as infinitives or participles (except occasionally in non-standard English; see below), nor as imperatives, nor (in the standard way) as subjunctives.
They function as auxiliary verbs: they modify the modality of another verb, which they govern. This verb generally appears as a bare infinitive, although in some definitions, a modal verb can also govern the to-infinitive (as in the case of ought).
They have the syntactic properties associated with auxiliary verbs in English, principally that they can undergo subject–auxiliary inversion (in questions, for example) and can be negated by the appending of not after the verb.
The following verbs have all of the above properties, and can be classed as the principal modal verbs of English. They are listed here in present–preterite pairs where applicable:
can and could
may and might
shall and should
will and would
must (no preterite; see etymology below)
Note that the preterite forms are not necessarily used to refer to past time, and in some cases, they are near-synonyms to the present forms.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Ontological neighbourhood
Related concepts (19)
Inflection
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as declension.
Uses of English verb forms
This article describes the uses of various verb forms in modern standard English language. This includes: Finite verb forms such as go, goes and went Nonfinite forms such as (to) go, going and gone Combinations of such forms with auxiliary verbs, such as was going and would have gone The uses considered include expression of tense (time reference), aspect, mood, modality and voice, in various configurations. For details of how inflected forms of verbs are produced in English, see English verbs.
Shall and will
Shall and will are two of the English modal verbs. They have various uses, including the expression of propositions about the future, in what is usually referred to as the future tense of English. Historically, prescriptive grammar stated that, when expressing pure futurity (without any additional meaning such as desire or command), shall was to be used when the subject was in the first person, and will in other cases (e.g., "On Sunday, we shall go to church, and the preacher will read the Bible.