The rise of contrastive modality in English

Abstract This paper proposes an account of the morphosyntactic and semantic changes involved in the historical development of the English modals as a distinct category. Adopting a neoparametric approach, in which a language’s inventory of grammatical features may change over time, we show that a cluster of related surface changes can be accounted for by positing that the featuremodalitywas added to English tense/mood system. While the most immediate manifestation of this change was the grammaticalization of the modals themselves, this in turn altered the system of contrasts in the language: in clauses without modal verbs, the absence of the modal became contrastive, narrowing the range of possible interpretations.