This book covers the essentials of modality and offers both foundational ideas and cutting edge advances. The book consists of what are essentially tutorials on modality and modal notions, covering definitions of modality, morphosyntactic form, conceptual and logical semantics, historical development, and acquisition. There are also specific chapters on modality in Zapotec and American Sign Language, which show the range of forms that modal notions can take. To assist its tutorial function, the book closes with a comprehensive conceptual outline of all the chapters. Key features: new series...

It was in the course of 1980 that it dawned upon several friends and colleagues of Manfred Bierwisch that a half century had passed since his birth in 1930. Manfred's youthful appearance had prevented a timely appreciation of this fact, and these friends and co11eagues are, therefore, not at ali embarrassed to be presenting him, almost a year late, with a Festschrift which willleave a trace of this noteworthy occasion in the archives of linguistics. It should be realized, however, that the deIay would have easily extended to 1990 if alI those who had wanted to contribute to this book had in...