Modality and Modalization in English and Arabic: A Contrastive Perspective

Abstract

Modality is generally perceived as a syntactic-semantic category realized by different parts of speech to express possibility, probability, permission, volition, obligation and necessity . But the concept and employment of modality widely diverge in English and Arabic, and by corollary modalization is resorted to as an intrinsic process of devising an Arabic form of modality for an existing English modal, because modality expressed by prepositions and particles has not commonly been recognized as modals in Arabic, and on the other hand an English modal is lexicalized in Arabic. The present paper tackles the most common types of modality, examines the syntactic and semantic aspects of two kinds of modality, namely epistemic and deontic modality in English and Arabic and endeavours to shed light on an uninvestigated phenomenon in Arabic where particles and prepositions ranging syntactically from one letter/sound to phrasal prepositions which semantically denote modality and not just perform the task of mere function words, albeit there are only two categories of finite Arabic verbs of approximation and commencement which perform the function of helping the main verbs analogous to the English modals. Modality is of a paramount importance in any act of communication via language as it gives the communicator the options of expressing a proposition or an opinion over the extent to which the assertion is possible, probable, certain or obligatory among others. Key words: deontic, epistemic, explicit, implicit, modality, modalize, lexicalize