Modal adjectives are
adjective
An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...
s, such as ''likely'', ''probable'' and ''necessary'', that express
modality
Modality may refer to:
Humanities
* Modality (theology), the organization and structure of the church, as distinct from sodality or parachurch organizations
* Modality (music), in music, the subject concerning certain diatonic scales
* Modalit ...
, i.e., possibility, necessity, or contingency.
In English
Modal adjectives can express modality regarding a situation or a participant in that situation. With situations, some usual syntactic patterns include an
extraposed subject,
such as the underlined elements in the following examples with the modal adjective in bold. Here the modal adjective is analyzed semantically as a sentential modal operator.
# ''It's possible
that some of them are broken.''
# ''It's likely
that they will come.''
# ''It is necessary''
(''for us'') ''to make a choice''''.''
For participants, however, the usual syntactic construction has the
adjective phrase
An adjective phrase (or adjectival phrase) is a phrase whose Head (linguistics), head is an adjective. Almost any grammar or syntax textbook or dictionary of linguistics terminology defines the adjective phrase in a similar way, e.g. Kesner Bland ( ...
in attributive modifier function,
as in the following examples, where the modal adjective is again in bold and this time the participant in underlined.
# ''We've found a potential
replacement.''
# ''They need to file the necessary
papers.''
# ''We took the obligatory
photo.''
Other constructions are also possible. For example, contingency may be expressed as ''We've made an offer contingent on the sale of our house'', which can be paraphrased as ''Our offer stands if and only if we sell our house.''
In Japanese
In Japanese, possibility is often expressed with the adjectives 可能 (kanou 'possible') and 不可能 (fukanou 'impossible'), as in:
Impossibility can also be expressed with the modal adjective 無理 (muri 'impossible') as in:
The modern Japanese particle べき (beki 'should') derives from the traditional modal adjective べし (beshi) but no longer inflects.
See also
*
Modal word
Modal words are words in a language that express modality, i.e., possibility, necessity, or contingency. One kind of modal word is the modal verb
A modal verb is a type of verb that contextually indicates a modality such as a ''likelihood'', ''abi ...
References
Linguistics
Semantics
Adjectives
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