Jed,

 

Modal verbs are messy because they appear to have past tenses, may/might, can/could, will/would, shall/should.  “Must” itself is originally a past subjunctive form, which is why it has not past tense form in Modern English.  However, this apparent tense marking is misleading.  There are only a few conditions under which their dental preterit (a term for the past tense in –d/-t that is common to the Germanic languages, actually marks past tense.  The most common of these is in a sequence of tenses construction.  Compare

 

Jack says that he will run down the hill with a bucket of water.

Jack said that he would run down the hill with a bucket of water.

 

The past tense of the dependent clause agrees with the past tense of the main clause.  We can say the sentence with “will” in the dependent clause, but it’s meaning will be slightly different.

 

Other than sequence of tenses, the dental preterits have come to behave like separate modals that only look morphologically related to the base stems.

 

Further, modals tend to fall into two large semantic categories of usage, what’s called “root” or “deontic” and what’s called “epistemic”.  The deontic meaning comes closer to the historical meanings of the words.  For example,

 

Jack may run down the hill.

 

can be interpreted deontically, meaning that he has permission.  It can also be interpreted epistemically, meaning that his running down the hill is a possibility.  Usually, deontic uses have truth value, that is, they can be shown to be true of false.  If Jack says he “may”, that he has permission, he may or may not be telling the truth.  If someone says “may” meaning that it’s a possibility, the statement cannot be said to be true or false because its irrealis, that is, it states an unfulfilled condition.

 

Because of these different things that modals do, they are treated separately from main verbs.  They don’t, in fact, have tense marking, except in the very restricted way I described, and they, when epistemic, have to do with whether or not the proposition has truth value and the conditions under which it might.  They also express the speaker’s attitude towards the proposition.  They differ syntactically in that they cannot be preceded by a negative.  Main verbs can’t be followed by a negative; any negative must follow an earlier auxiliary verb, and modals fit into this pattern syntactically.  They also invert with the subject in questions and get copied to the end in tag questions.  Main verbs don’t do these things.

 

Syntacticians have come up with some clever ways of handling these facts, but I’ll let someone else address that.

 

Herb

 

 

 

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