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Modality is a cross-linguistic category that is normally discussed in the context of tense and aspect since these three categories are often marked within the verbal complex. Its status, compared with that of tense and aspect, is, however, more vague and complex to the extent that one might find it quite difficult to identify the borderlines of its domain. The thesis attempts to lessen some of this vagueness through studying modality in English and Arabic, from both a descriptive and an analytic perspective. The analysis will draw on the theory of HPSG. The thesis, in general, attempts to achieve five aims. The first is to reduce the obscurity around modality by illustrating its main aspects in general and exploring it in two languages which are different in termns of the way they realise it. The second is to describe the morphological, semantic/notional, and syntactic properties of the set of English modal auxiliaries and how the members of this set interact with negation. The third is to present an up-to-date theoretical account that covers the main aspects of English modal auxiliaries, and, most importantly, fills the current gaps in the literature which will be specified in the review of the relevant previous analyses. The fourth aim is to answer the question 'how is modality expressed in Arabic?' and to provide a detailed theory-neutral description of the linguistic properties of the different Arabic modals and how they interact with negation. The fifth and last aim is to propose a theoretical analysis that covers the formal linguistic aspects of Arabic modals. The work done for achieving the latter three aims will include the thesis' original contribution to the knowledge in the field.

This thesis discusses evidentiality and presents case studies of selected English verbal constructions that have evidential functions. The constructions have clear evidential functions, but each is problematic in terms of its diachronic development. Two have been the subject of some discussion in previous work: BE going to (e.g. Berglund and Williams 2007, Langacker 1998, Leech 1971, 2004, Nicolle 1997, 1998) and BE supposed to (e.g. Berkenfield 2006,Moore 2007, Noel and van der Auwera 2009, Traugott 1989, Visconti 2004, Zeigler 2003). The other, BE meant to, is in present day English a polysemous construction with a range of uses very similar to that of BE supposed to. The constructions are problematic in different ways and this thesis attempts to resolve those difficulties, applying the notion of analogy in each case. The thesis is framed in a Cognitive Linguistic and usage-based perspective (e.g. Bybee 1985, Croft 2000, Langacker 1987,2008). The thesis addresses three central questions. Firstly, it asks to what extent English can be said to have conventionalised evidential constructions, and how these compare to typical, i.e. morphological, evidential constructions in languages that have an evidential morphology (see Aikhenvald 2004, Aikhenvald and Dixon 2003, Chafe and Nichols 1986). Secondly, it asks to what extent grammaticalisation and other widely cited historical processes, particularly analogy, apply to the constructions in the case studies (cf. Bybee and Pagliuca 1987, Traugott 1989, 2002, Traugott and Dasher 2001). Thirdly, the thesis considers the constraining or "guiding" role of conceptual space (e.g. Anderson 1986, Croft 2000, 2001, Haspelmath 2003) in the development of the constructions. While also referring to descriptive grammars, such as Visser (1973) and Quirk et al (1985), the thesis provides a corpus-based account of the historical development of each of these constructions. I use data from a range of existing corpora such as the Early English Books Online collection, and a corpus collated from freely available 18th century texts. The Helsinki Corpus and the British National Corpus are used for exemplifying some issues. The frequencies over time periods are subjected to statistical significance tests, where appropriate. I show how a usage-based diachronic construction grammar approach can help account for the complexities of these individual constructions. The usage-based theoretical perspective, especially with respect to the process of analogy, is shown to be able to explain some problematic issues that arise with respect to unidirectionality and subjectification in grammaticalisation, and the studies are applied to the Semantic Map Connectivity Hypothesis (Croft 2001, Haspelmath 2003). There are significant areas identified for further research, particularly in the way in which modal domains intersect, overlap and interact.

This dissertation investigates the relationship between verbs and reflexive markers within reflexive constructions, setting forth the hypothesis that the verb plays a determining role in anaphoric binding. The work builds upon Dalrymple’s (1993) argument that binding constraints are lexically specified by anaphoric elements and demonstrates that reflexive requirements can be lexically specified for distinct groups of verbs, an approach which offers another level of descriptive clarity to theories of anaphoric binding and introduces a means of predicting reflexive selection in domains where syntactic constraints do not readily apply. This is shown to be particularly pertinent in languages with more than one reflexive type that have overlapping syntactic binding domains. The hypothesis is substantiated by data from five typologically distinct languages: English, Dutch, French, Russian, and Fijian. Contributing to this data set, new empirical evidence in favour of previously unrecognized reflexive forms in the Fijian language is introduced in this work. Following Sells et al. (1987), it is demonstrated that reflexive constructions are definable over four different components of linguistic representation and a quadripartite linguistic analysis is, therefore, adopted that incorporates c-structure, f-structure, lexical structure, and semantic structure within a Lexical Functional Grammar theoretical framework. The level of semantic structure is found to be particularly interesting since the realization of a reflexive construction is shown to be influenced by differing semantic requirements between verbs and reflexives. On the basis of several semantic tests, verbs in reflexive constructions are shown to have two different predicate structure types, ‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive’, and reflexive markers are shown to have three different internal semantic structures, ‘strict’ (x,x), ‘close’ (x,f(x)), and ‘near’ (x,y). The syntactic, semantic, and lexical characteristics of the reflexives and verbs analyzed over the data set presented in this work result in the identification of eight different reflexive/verb types and the establishment of two implicational relationships: <ol><li>Reflexive markers in lexically intransitive reflexive constructions have no semantic content.</li><li>Verbs that take a reflexive argument with a strict (x,x) or close (x,f(x)) internal structure must be intransitive at the semantic component of linguistic structure.</li></ol> These results contribute to our understanding of anaphoric binding theory, directed verb categories, the syntax-semantics interface, and the licensing of multiple reflexive types within a given language.