Modality

Modality (or illocutionary force) is a semantic category used to indicate the attitudes on the part of the speaker towards the factual content of the utterance, e.g. uncertainty, definiteness, vagueness, possibility. It is normally manifest by the grammatical category of mood, but may also be expressed by lexical means.

Natural language

In natural languages, modality is normally associated with the grammatical category of mood.
In synthetic languages, the distinction between grammatical tense, aspect and mood is fuzzy and at times controversial. In order to avoid the problems concerning isolating these categories, which are often amalgamated in a single morpheme, the UNLarium proposes a single TAM (Tense-Aspect-Mood) typology, to be found here.

UNL

In UNL, modality is to be represented by attributes indicating propositional attitudes.

Examples

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