Must remove your shoes.' Similarly with may, weĬan use may to express a possibility, like saying 'It may rain.' That's something thatĬould possibly happen. You take off your shoes, they would say 'You You enter someone's house and they demand that Ride the Doom-Coaster.' This is like a necessary condition. Want to ride has a height requirement, the sign probably says 'You must be this tall to But if you're at an amusement park and the roller coaster you To express a likelihood, a high likelihood. 'He must have gone that way!' That detective is using must So, if you imagine aĭetective looking up from some tracks, some muddyīootprints on the floor, with her magnifying glass. So the word must, right? We can use the word must Which, like we said,Įstablishes conditions. That modal verbs can do is indicate modality. Version of English you speak, across all varieties ofĮnglish you cannot to should. So there's no such thing as to may, or to could. They don't have a to form, this is what we call the infinitive. Something else that modalsĭo is actually something that they don't do. I can do it, you can do it, she can do it, they can do it, we can do it. Sentence is going to take the modal verb the same way. So you can take any one of these modals and you can use any subject in the world and it's not gonna change, right? You take a word like talk, for instance, and you would say I talk, Diane talks. Thing number one, theyĪgree with everything. May, might, must, can, could, shall, should, will, would. And whether or not we have the obligation or requirement or need to do something.

Whether or not something is possible, or whether or not we have

To determine if something is likely to happen, orĬertain to have happened. These verbs to express conditions on stuff.

But what is modality? My fellow grammarian, Have special properties and help other verbs. Hello grammarians! Today we're gonna talkĪbout a class of auxiliary, or helper verbs, called the modal verbs.

What are modals