This volume is a selection of papers presented at the 7th Chronos colloquium in Antwerp (2006), which deal with the expression of modality (in a wide sense), by modal and semi-modal verbs (in Germanic and Romance languages), on the one hand, and by other markers (in languages like Turkish, Tibetan and Japanese), on the other. The Antwerp edition’s special conference topic was the interaction between tense and modality, of which some of the papers collected in this volume also testify. The volume covers a wide range of languages and topics. Specific topics include: the distinction between root and epistemic modality and its interaction with tense and counterfactuality; epistemic deve and dovrebbe in Italian; semi-modals in German; the interpretation of epistemic past modals in English and Spanish; the interface between Turkish ‘almost’ adverbs and the Turkish verbal system; the meaning of epistemic endings in Spoken Standard Tibetan; Korean ‘evidential’ markers teiru and ta and so-called fake past sentences in Japanese.

Contents

Tanja Mortelmans: Introduction Kristin M. Eide: Modals and the present perfect An Verhulst and Renaat Declerck: Constraints on the meanings of modal auxiliaries in counterfactual clauses Hamida Demirdache and Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria: Non-root past modals Andrea Rocci: The Italian modal dovere in the conditional: future reference, evidentiality and argumentation Gabriele Diewald and Elena Smirnova: The German evidential constructions and their origins: a corpus based analysis Eser E. Taylan and Ayhan Aksu-Koç: Adverbs at the interface of tense, aspect and modality: evidence from Turkish Zuzana Vokurková: Epistemic modalities and evidentiality in Standard Spoken Tibetan Toshiyuki Sadanobu and Andrej Malchukov: Evidential extensions of aspectotemporal forms in Japanese from a typological perspective Sumiyo Nishiguchi: Fake past and covert emotive modality