The purpose of this study is to examine how the modal verbs- deber, querer and poder – are treated and explained in selected tasks in two exercise books Colores 9 Exercise Book and ¡Qué bien! 9 Exercises. Texts linked to the tasks in their respective textbooks are also examined. By taking into consideration the research questions, this study helps to show how the selected exercises in each exercise book deal with how modal verbs are designed and used from amorphosyntactic perspective in the selected exercises, and this study will also examine how the function and meaning of these modal verbs are explained in their context. The study uses a qualitative method with a content analysis based on a functional perspective, which includes an analysis of three categories or perspectives designed to answer the research questions. The analysis shows that the exercise books have some exercises that use the modal verbs deber, querer, and poder among other verbs to teach grammar but exercises focusing on these modal verbs are missing. The selected exercises which discuss the modal verbs include deductive and inductive strategies in which grammar learning can take place as a product and as a process. The authors of the exercise books use translation, memorization, and repetition of the contents of the textbooks in most of the exercises. These modal verbs are also used in exercises that focus on free communication to understand language. From a morphosyntactic perspective, all three verbs are largely used only in the present tense in indicative and querer and poder are treated as examples of diphthong verbs. Finally, it is shown that the selected exercises do not deal with the function and meaning of modal verbs. The study concludes that the pedagogical methods used in the two exercise books to convey the content of the exercises do not help to gain an understanding of the importance of the function and meaning that these modal verbs have, although they are significant for language learning.

This study focuses on the notions of deontic and dynamic modality in Spanish and how they are expressed through the modal verbs deber ‘must’ and tener que ‘have to’. The analysis is based on a corpus of political debates from the European Parliament, conducted 2010‒2011 by Spanish MEPs. In total, 578 occurrences of deber and 334 occurrences of tener que have been studied in detail, in order to understand their semantic and pragmatic behavior. Out of the 912 cases, 860 were classified as deontic necessity and 52 as dynamic necessity. When separating the deontic readings from the dynamic ones, the notions of volitivity and factuality proved to be crucial: whereas deontic cases are volitive and non-factual, dynamic cases can be described as non-volitive and, to a high extent, factual. In order to further examine the deontic uses, four classificatory variables were taken into account, namely, grammatical person, degree of agentivity, tense and source of the necessity. The distributions of deber and tener que were analyzed using Chi-square tests. Statistically significant differences were found for all four variables. The results show that deber is highly preferred in the third person, whereas tener que occurs equally often in the first and third person. Moreover, deber occurs more frequently in contexts which obscure the responsible agent, such as the impersonal se construction and inanimate subjects. As far as tense is concerned, the major difference between deber and tener que is found in the conditional tense, where tener que barely occurs, while deber is fairly frequent. A final difference between the two verbs is that the speaker usually is the source of the necessity when tener que is used, whereas deber is the first option when the speaker refers to another source or authority. In conclusion, it is argued, firstly, that there is a clear difference between deontic and dynamic modality in Spanish, and secondly, that deber and tener que display different semantic and pragmatic functions in deontic contexts, pointing towards an intersubjective use of deber and a subjective use of tener que.