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This book presents the first in-depth investigation of modality in Galician linguistics, offering a theoretical discussion of modal categories and a fine-grained description of epistemic adverbs.

The first half of the monograph deconstructs the most relevant approaches to modal categories and shows

- how the traditional concept of modality is a problematic notion,

- how it relates to other concepts such as evidentiality and mitigation, and

- how it ought to be conceived of in order to become a more useful instrument for linguistic analysis.

A new way of understanding modality is explored and illustrated through Galician examples. The second half of the book zooms in on six epistemic adverbs, which are exhaustively studied from both a formal and a functional perspective. Combining a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, the book shows that adverbs make up a rich semantic scale and establishes several factors that condition their occurrence in discourse, challenging previous conceptions of this grammatical domain.

Part I. Preliminaries

Chapter 1. Introduction

Part II. Theoretical background

Chapter 2. The concept of modality

Chapter 3. Functionalist approaches to modality

Chapter 4. Modality and neighboring categories

Chapter 5. Modality revisited: The Galician system

Part III. A focus on epistemic adverbs

Chapter 6. Corpus and method

Chapter 7. Epistemic adverbs: Syntagmatic and paradigmatic properties

Chapter 8. Epistemic adverbs: A pragmatic approach

Part IV. Conclusion

Chapter 9. General summary and discussion

Bibliography

Appendixes

Appendix A. Appendix of tables

Appendix B. Appendix of listings (R output)

Index