Peter,

It's more accurate to say that modals don't have tense--except when they
do.  There are some interesting theoretical treatments of the
tenselessness of main clause modals that I won't go into here.
Historically, though, the verbs the modals developed from had the more
concrete meanings, ability, permission, intent, etc.  With these
meanings, their past tenses, modern "might", "would", "should" ("could"
wasn't an original form but developed by analogy to "would" and
"should"), were formed with fairly normal weak past inflections and had
past meanings.  "Ought", which we use as a semi-modal today, was
originally the past tense of "owe", in Old English "agan/agte" and those
forms developed by normal sound changes into modern "owe" and "ought".
I bring this one up as an example of how the meanings of once regular
forms can change so much that the two words no longer have any
connection with each other.

There is one context in which modals still have tense, and that is in
the sequence of tense constructions we often find in indirect discourse,
as in

He will be here.
He says he will be here.
He said he would be here. 

He may come in by the front door. (permission)
He says he may come in by the front door. (permission)
He said he ?might come in by the front door. (possibility)

As the second set of sentences shows, there is an interaction between
semantics and form.  Some modals have to be interpreted as epistemic
(attitudinal) in indirect discourse, or as deontic (concrete), but not
the other.  Unfortunately we can't write simple rules for tense in
indirect discourse, because 

He said he will be here 

is also possible.  Much depends on factors like the attitude of the
speaker to the truth of the proposition, or the speaker's intent to
foreground a clause by putting it into the present tense when past might
be expected.

Clearly this is a messy area of the grammar, and I'd recommend looking
at one of the major reference grammars where you'll find some pretty
extensive treatment.

Herb 

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Adams
Sent: Friday, November 02, 2007 10:49 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: modals and tense

I've only been following this list for about a year, and I'll be you  
have thrashed this topic around more than once in the past.  But I  
wasn't here for those thrashings, so I'm inviting another round.

How do you analyze tense and modals?  Is "might" the past tense of  
"may"?  Is "could" the past tense of "can"?  Or is it more accurate  
to say that modals don't inflect for tense?  There are ten (?) modals  
(will, would, shall, should, can, could, may, might, must, and ought  
to, and none of them is past tense.

Peter Adams

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