Grammar
English
The most up-to-date, comprehensive, and authoritative English grammar, bar none, is the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, 2002. I will refer to this book as CamGEL.
Modality
- This ELT teacher training page mentions a fourth modality—"alethic" (真勢模態的，真理論的)—new to me. I have learned about not two but three modalities from CamGEL: epistemic, deontic, and dynamic. Lesser grammar books cover only the first two, and may not even use those adjectives to name them properly. The ELT page cites F. R. Palmer's Mood and Modality (e2, 2001), yet the Palmer book does not actually cover alethic modality. Luckily, it receives moderate treatment in Semantics, vol. 2 by John Lyons. It's also defined in The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar, ed. by Aerts et al:
Necessarily and logically true.
The term, taken from 'modal logic, comes from the Greek word alétheia 'truth', and is concerned with the necessary truth of propositions. It is sometimes used in the analysis of modal verbs, though most grammarians include this meaning under 'epistemic' modality. The distinction between alethic and epistemic modality, when it is made, is that alethic modality is concerned with logical deduction (e.g. If she's a widow, her husband must have died), whereas epistemic modality, relates to confident inference (e.g. They were married over fifty years—she must miss him).
Predicate vs. Predicative
Absolute verbs 不明示受詞的「絕對」動詞
Chinese
An influential grammar on Mandarin Chinese I've read:
- Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (漢語語法), Li & Thompson