This study deals with the distinction between subjective and objective modality on the basis of the English modal auxiliaries. I show that this distinction is still very poorly understood, both in terms of the criteria that have been proposed to support it, and in terms of the actual delineation of subjectivity and objectivity in the modal domain. After identifying the empirical and theoretical problems in the literature, I propose an alternative, semiotic account, which tries to explain the divergent grammatical behavior of subjective and objective modality in terms of the function they fulfill. The central factor in this semiotic explanation is the performative versus non-performative status of the modals, which can explain their divergent behavior with respect to tense, interrogation, and conditionality. On the basis of this alternative analysis, I also propose a more accurate delineation of subjective and objective functions in the English modal auxiliary system. 0

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This paper is a cross-linguistic study of counterfactuality in simple clauses, as in the English construction The police should have intervened. On the basis of a representative sample of languages, we investigate (i) how counterfactuality is most commonly marked, and (ii) what these patterns of marking can tell us about the nature and origins of counterfactuality. We first show that counterfactuality is most frequently marked by a combination of elements that have other functions in other contexts, rather than by one single 'dedicated' marker. Contrary to popular belief, neither past tense nor imperfective aspect is a universal feature in the combinations of markers used to signal counterfactuality: the only type of element that is found in every combination is a modal element marking some type of potentiality, which can be combined (i) with past tense markers, (ii) with a combination of past tense and aspectual (perfect or perfective) markers, or (iii) just with aspectual markers. On the basis of these findings about the marking of counterfactuality, we argue that counterfactuality typically originates as a semanticization of pragmatic information, more specifically an implicature derived from the compositional meaning of a combination of a modal element and a past, perfect or perfective element.