This study sets out to provide an up-to-date survey of 12 Germanic languages, from English and German to Faroese and Yiddish. Spoken by more than 450 million native speakers worldwide, the Germanic languages have enormous cultural and social significance. This work offers a chapter-length description of each language, focusing on the structure of the languages as they are spoken today, and also giving an analysis of language history and development. Based on recent scholarship, The Germanic Languages presents detailed research both on the major Germanic languages, and rarely-covered minor...

This volume presents two kinds of studies on English modality.

On the one hand, there are strongly empirical, corpus-based studies of individual uses of English modal auxiliaries and modal constructions, such as may in interrogatives, might in concessive clauses, shall and may vs must in legal English, the use of surprised if and surprising if constructions, the use and history of adhortative constructions, or the modal-aspectual use of come to in I came to realize that X. The book also contains work...