Bedeutung und Gebrauch der deutschen Modalverben: Lexikalische Einheit als Basis kontextueller Vielheit

An abstract juxtaposition of two intentional verbs, their internal directedness at the other, and the external relation between them become the framework conditions for the semantic substance that creates the German modal verbs. This study proposes the “modal scenario” as a model to describe the meaning of will, should, must, etc., and verifies it using extensive corpus data.