Mood and modality

[svartnik]

Thanks, guys. The link you provided, Anthony, is not exactly bedtime reading.

[orangutan]

As orangutan suggests, modal logic doesn't deal with the logic of modal verbs at all. It's a branch of philosophical logic rather than human-language grammar.

This is true, and in particular it doesn't have a good correspondence to the class of modal verbs in English, as traditionally delimited. Nonetheless it does bring together notions which are often (though not always) associated with auxiliary verbs and inflectional elements, one of whose functions is to modify the truth value of a sentence.

It's also a field of interest in computing, especially artificial intelligence. Computers think in binary True/False terms. Applying modal logic (and other forms of logic) to computers might enable them to think in terms of True / False / Maybe / Probably, etc.