Imagine trying to speak without expressing possibility, permission,or necessity; it would be like painting without colour. That’s were the modal verb step in. These special helping verbs—can, could, ...

Picture a small child saying: "Can’t, shan’t, won’t!" They are using modal verbs to show their feelings and attitude to something. Maybe they are refusing to go to bed or eat their peas. Modal verbs ...

Making polite requests are a part of daily life in a range of situations – we might be in a formal setting like an office, at a work party or we might be making a request because we need something.

The lexical mapping of abstract functional words like modal verbs is an open problem in acquisition (e.g., Gleitman et al. 2005). In diachronic linguistics it has been proposed that learner mapping ...