Temporal Characteristics of English Modal Verbs: Difficulties and Solutions
The article deals with the temporal characteristics of English modal verbs and covers the main issues pertaining to their temporal interpretation. It outlines several properties of the lexical group in questions reflecting the correlation of modality, tense and aspect in English sentences: the incomplete tense paradigm; the dependence of their temporal interpretation on the modality type and some restrictions on their tense form usage; the ability to represent temporal features of the modal and propositional components of the sentence; aspectual differences of infinitival complements in root and epistemic utterances and the dependence of the infinitive aspect on the semantics of the complement