English modal auxiliaries come in many flavors. The goal of this paper is to spell out the dimensions along which they vary. The ultimate purpose of detailing this variation is for use in giving a formal analysis of modals. I do not provide such an analysis in this paper however. The dimensions of variation can be divided into two broad categories : contextual variation and grammatical variation. Contextual variation includes context-dependent differences in intuitive interpretations for a single modal expression, while grammatical variation typically shows up in differences among distinct modal expressions.

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