MODAL VERBS: EXPRESSION OF THE POSSIBILITY AND SUPPOSITION IN MODERN ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Modality is expression of speaker's attitude that a state of affairs is not simply true or false, but that the propositional content of the respective sentence must be evaluated against some background information. The speaker's judgment may be of different kinds, that is, the speaker may express various modal meanings. English modality can be expressed by different linguistic means. In actual speech all forms expressing modality work together to make the meaning clear. But in every case there is some leading form that expresses the main attitude. These forms fall into four categories: phonetic (intonation), grammatical (mood), lexico-grammatical (modal verbs), lexical (modal words and phrases). But the most important from them is the third form, which includes modal verbs.
Modal verbs, unlike other verbs, do not denote actions or states, but only show the attitude of the speaker towards the action expressed by the infinitive. Thus they may show that the action (or state, or process) is considered by the speaker as possible, impossible, probable, improbable, obligatory, necessary, advisable, doubtful, certain, prohibited, ordered, etc.
Modal verbs occur only with the infinitive. This or that meaning is to a great degree determined by communicative type of the sentence and the form of the infinitive. That is a huge problem for foreign lea
ers of English, who make a great deal of mistakes in this field.
The speaker's attitude towards the action if the sentence may be expressed by modal verbs which represent an action as necessary or unnecessary, possible or impossible, certain of doubtful and the like. But modal verbs need not be used in every sentence and are, therefore, to be regarded as an additional means of expressing the speaker's attitude towards the action in the sentence.
The present paper devoted to the analysis of use of various ways of expression of the possibility and supposition in mode
English language. To open this theme, the use of some modal...

Modality as a grammatical category is gove
ed by a set of parameters. The first parameter is constituted by the components of modality. These are formed by the modal subject (i.e. the speaker), the modal proposition (i.e. the encoded situation), the modal undergoer (i.e. the agent in the encoded situation), the modal attitude (i.e. the view of the encoded situation by the speaker), and the modal source (i.e. the source of the view)). The second parameter is formed by the claim that modality can be categorized on the basis of conceptual properties, which is the basic assumption on which a categorization of types of modalities rests, based on conceptual properties such as knowledge, belief, possibility, necessity, etc. Finally, the third parameter consists of the claim that modal expressions are to be viewed in the context of grammaticalization, meaning that an analysis of the encoding of modal expressions is also conce
ed with how and to what extent elements which mark a sentence for modality are grammaticalized.
The attitude of the speaker can either belong to the whole thought or this or that part of the given thought. From the grammatical point of view the thought can have different features or directions. Having investigated the materials of different languages, the attitude of the speaker to the given thought can be determined as the followings:
– affirmative or negative modality;
– objective or the subjective modality;
– real or unreal modality;
– desirable or undesirable modality;
– true or untrue (false) modality;
– supposed or unsupposed modality;
– necessary or unnecessary modality;
– important or unimportant modality;
– time modality.
Modality denoting the expressiveness, increasing or decreasing the sense of the word.
These preliminaries conce
ing the model of modality underlying this paper are followed by brief descriptions of the most common types of modal verbs and a portrait of the most salient linguistic features of the English language.
This...