By Modals, Inflections

1. 'Last week, I may go sailing.' I find this sentence baffling: it seems to contradict itself. The contradiction seems to reside in the opposition of 'may' and 'last week'. I myself would describe this as a conflict of context (past) and tense (non-past). How would you describe it? The...

1. If the car breaks down on you, you would have to pay for the repair, if you didn't buy the warranty. You can think of the conditional as a contraint. So in the above there are two conditions: 1) IF the proposition (the car breaks down on you). Because you have two if-clauses in your...

There are twenty-eight auxiliary forms in English. (F. R. Palmer: The English Verb) BE: is, are, am, was, were, ("nonfinite forms" be, being, been), HAVE: has, have, had, ("nonfinite forms" have, having), DO: do, does, did, MODALS: will, would, shall, should, can, could, may, might, must,...

I was a bit confused myself in the beginning becuase I thought that modals were just can, could; may, might; will, would; must; shall, should. These verbs are the "classical" modals, but every verb that expresses/describes the modus of a full verb is a modal verb: I may go e.g. means I have...