This book is a report of an investigation into the meanings of the
modal auxiliaries in modern British English. The investigation took
the form of a large-scale corpus-based project, looking at modal
auxiliaries in both written and spoken language, and taking into
account stylistic variation. The analysis of a corpus of a 'real'
language brings the analyst face-to-face with a problem which has
frequently been avoided or ignored in theoretical semantics:
language is not an orderly phenomenon, and, as far as meaning is
concerned, indeterminacy seems to be a feature of all languages.
But it is one thing to recognise the existence of indeterminacy,
and another to deal with it adequately. Semantic analysis
conventionally consists in distinguishing one meaning from another,
in recognising discrete categories, but the acknowledgement of
indeterminacy explicitly denies the existence of such discrete
categories. This book examines in detail this problem and its
relationship to a study of modals.
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