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.

The goal of the thesis is to contribute to the description of the category of aspect and to do so in an alternative way, i.e. without linking aspectual value of a sentence exclusively or directly to the morphological make-up of the verb. The starting point is the distinction between states and activities, i.e. between state and activity events. In the center of our attention are states, namely the way how states are expressed by perfective predicates. Two analyses of corpus data (SYN v7) were performed to pursue the issue. The first analysis focused on the occurrence of state and activity meanings of perfective forms of so-called capacitive verbs. It turns out that one of the decisive factors construing the aspectual meaning of a sentence is the category of tense. The other analysis focused on a collocation we have termed aspectual paradox. It combines durative adverbials (for instance stále) with perfective verbs in the framework of one construction. This analysis has demonstrated that another important factor involved in sentence aspectual construal is modality. Another outcome of this analysis is a classification of state meanings of the "durative adverbial + perfective" collocation. Eleven kinds of meanings were established: ability, possibility, existence, quality, quantity, etc. Verba...