Ways of expressing modality.

An introduction

Abstract

This paper introduces the present volume, in which modal particles and other expressions of modality are studied from an interdisciplinary and crosslinguistic perspective, with a special focus on the comparison between German and Italian. The contributions address two broad dimensions: the interdisciplinary study of modal particles, including their grammatical, pragmatic, and multimodal properties, and the crosslinguistic investigation of modality, extending the descriptions and analyses beyond Germanic to Romance languages.