Subordinating Modalities
Hohaus, Pascal
This study is concerned with the use of the English modals (may, might, can, could, shall, should, will, would and must) in adverbial, relative complement clauses. It employs synchronic data from the British National Corpus and quantitative methods to investigate similarities and differences between the core modals, as well as modal-specific preferences in subordinate clauses. The main finding is that modal verbs in subordinate clauses may be ...