Sentence modality as a distinctive category

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of sentence modality (constitutive of the sentence), reviews the extant conceptions of this language phenomenon through examples from an array of linguistic dictionaries, grammatical textbooks and linguistic studies and looks at the available linguistic-theoretical approaches to the problem (traditional-grammatical, transformational-generative and generative-semantic). The author contends that many authors show a lack of a common, generic label for this feature of the sentence. In closing, the author concludes that sntence modality is a distinctive category of statements, inherent to every sentence and its constitutive part and that its exploration is of particular interest because it relates to a field where morphology and syntax, syntax and semantics, the cognitive and the communicative function of language overlap.