Marina Dossena

This volume presents the results of a research team of the University of Bergamo, whose aim was the analysis of verbal modality in the Helsinki corpus. This corpus includes a large selection of texts compiled in Middle English and Early Modern English and offers a good diatypic coverage, as it contains a wide range of text-types, genres and registers. Within a common methodological framework, individual chapters measure and analyze the occurrence and semantic values of central modal verbs, relating them to such parameters as text type, speech-relatedness and pragmatic function. This research project is part of a wider national project aiming to register and comment on the formal variety of modal manifestations and their relative frequency in a range of texts covering approximately four centuries, from about 1300 to 1700.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at an international conference held in Bergamo (5-6 May 2000), which focussed on the semantic and pragmatic values of modality in specialized texts - legal, economic, academic and medical. The assembled contributions give an overview of the range of scholarly approaches to modality. They convey the theoretical background and provide in-depth analyses of specialized texts on a synchronic as well as on a diachronic level.