May, might and degrees of positivity in four English sentence types

This paper develops the framework of telling and knowledge operators earlier proposed for distinctions of mood and sentence types in the lexical verb (Davies 2006) to apply to non-inferential epistemic modal verbs. It consists of two parts: the first offers some background to the approach and sets out the formal model used; the second applies this model to two modal verbs. It considers the meanings of the modal verbs may (not) and might (not) as used in four different English sentence-types, with a view to assessing the different degrees of ‘loading’ towards a positive belief that they convey. Different kinds of meanings are suggested, one to do with degrees of a speaker’s commitment to what s/he is saying (‘presentational meaning’), and another to do with attitudes projected, by the speaker through the constructions s/he uses, onto the addressee(s) in a developing text (‘textual meaning’). In the case of the two modal verbs studied here, the textual meaning is said to be contrastive in relation to the speaker’s own ‘presentational meaning’.