Mood and Modality

Modality is a thriving area in linguistics, with a long tradition of studies from different approaches. The unifying thread of this advanced seminar is modality in English, which will be approached from diverse perspectives. Modality is traditionally concerned with mood (indicative, subjunctive, etc.) and with modal markers such as English modal verbs (can, may,might, must, etc.) and is treated as a single grammatical category found in most of the languages of the world. This seminar, however, will address issues such as the conceptual nature of modality, and the evolution and current status of the modal auxiliaries and other modal expressions such as nouns (e.g. intention, request, requirement, etc.), marginal modals (e.g. dare, need, ought to, etc.), lexical verbs (e.g. advise, be going to, have to, intend, propose, require, suggest, etc.), adjectives (e.g. bound, desirable, essential, imperative, likely, necessary, obligatory, etc.), adverbs (e.g. maybe, necessarily, obligatorily, perhaps, possibly, surely, etc.), and modal idioms (e.g. have got to, be to, had better, would rather/sooner, etc.) It will also attempt to shed new light on the relationship between the domains of modality and evidentiality, and with neighbouring grammatical categories, such as TAM (i.e. Tense-Aspect-Modality) systems. In addition, the seminar will examine the use of modal and evidential expressions and the variation whereof in different discourse domains and genres, in the modelling of discourse identities, and in the expression of stance and evaluation. Literature – Reader: copy shop Stork (Körnerstraße) Required Reading: see Reader. Please check Stud.IP for updates and additional information as the semester approaches. Further secondary literature will be made available on my reserve shelf in the FBL Deutsche und Englische Linguistik, Master of Arts LingA1; FAL 1.1/FAL 1.2 Assessment Tasks – SL certificate: annotated bibliography (7-8 pages) or book review (7-8 pages) or topic reflection (6-7 pages) or presentation in class (20 minutes); PL certificate FüBA/MEd: term paper (at least 5000 words); PL certificate FAL: term paper (15-20 pages) Registration – Stud.IP 1.3.-30.3.2016 Prerequisites – LingF1-LingF4 (FüBA) Further Information –rainer.schulze@engsem.~ Universität Hannover SoSe 2016 Englisch, Master LbS Prof. Dr. phil. Schulze Rainer phil