What is a modal?
Apparently there are 11 modals. drsmita asked a question about the difference between "should get" and "get" which ian-hill answered but I did not understand. Am I the only one who does not know what a modal is or the what the 11 modals are?
2 Answers
Great post Pumpkin,
Gohern, you probably haven't ran into the terms because you've been focused on Spanish, which doesn't have them. However our Spanish speaking friends are generally very used to the terms, as they learn our language.
For us, they're usually taught to us in English class as helping verbs or auxiliary verbs, though not all helping verbs are modals. (i.e. modals are a subset of auxiliaries).
The trick in Spanish for us, is that they use mood (subjunctive) or conditional for many things that we simply us a modal verb for, so it´s often not a case of there being a one to one correspondence between methods of expressing something between Spanish and English, and thus, also not in the terms that are used. I remember struggling initially with the same in German, which has both modal and subjunctive ways of expression - looking back it seems easy, but it sure didn´t at the time. At least it gave me the concept and terminology of modals, lest I´d have had the same question as gohern. Modal is just not a super common grammar term at basic to intermediate levels of English (at least as taught in the U.S.)
Modals in general alter or qualify other verbs, but in mood, as opposed to adverbs, which describe their manner.
That would be good. Eso sería bueno.
Could you do it? Podría hacerlo?
Is there someone that could help us? Hay alguien que pueda ayudarnos?
Parting thought. We native English speakers don´t even think about modals normally at all, just as native Spanish speakers don´t think about subjunctive. I´ve noted that we English speakers learning Spanish talk about the subjunctive a lot, and the natives often find our taught rules like ¨doubt-disbelief¨ etc to be missing the point a lot. Conversely, we English speakers hear English learners talking about modals a lot, because it´s something in our language that they sometimes struggle with conceptually. For us, it´s mostly useful for having conversations comparing and contrasting English and Spanish.
From the perspective of someone learning Spanish, I wouldn´t get to hung up on it (though it IS interesting)
I did not understand this either at first but then I looked it up online, and it seems that it is fairly straightforward: they are those little "helping" verbs that show some quality or change the emphasis of a following verb. These are the most common eight (according to Wikipedia):
- must
- might
- should
- will
- could
- can
- would
- may
- might
I'm not sure where the figure 11 comes from, although there are some more minor modals such as "ought" and such that could be counted as part of the list. For further reference, here is the Wikipedia article I consulted, which has a very thorough description of modals.
