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GÜNTER RADDEN, Meaningful Grammar

these normally occur in the immediate future. Events expressed by
the be going to-Future are, therefore, expected to come to pass in the
immediate future.

3. Modality and modal verbs

Grammarians and logicians distinguish different kinds of modality.
We will first look at epistemic and non-epistemic modalities and then
discuss the puzzling issue of why the same modal verbs are used to
express different kinds of modality, not just in English but in many
other languages as well.

3.1. Epistemic modality
The model of evolving reality sketched in Figure 1 includes one more
type of reality that has not been touched upon this far: potential real-
ity. Potential reality belongs to the domain of modality. Like future
reality, potential reality is not factual. but whereas future situations
are expected to come to pass, the situations described as modal are
seen as uncertain: they may or may not occur. Modality is concerned
with the notions of necessity and possibility, as in This may be true and
This must be true. Put simply, “modality refers to the area of meaning
that lies between yes and no – the intermediate ground between pos-
itive and negative polarity”(Halliday 1994: 356). The intermediate
ground covers a range of values from low to high probability, as illus-
trated in Table 3. Here, the positive and negative poles are represented
by categorical assertions, and the intermediate range of modality is
represented by three modal verbs.

Modality
low median high
negative positive
assertion possibility necessity assertion
It is not true. It may be true. It will be true. It must be true. It is true.

Table 3: Range of epistemic modality between ‘negative assertion’ and
‘positive assertion’.

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