Modal use often depends on context and the degree of formality and politeness that a social situation requires. Again, this can be difficult for learners to grasp given that a modal looks much like a verb but functions differently. They also must understand that a modal is used to communicate the speaker’s perspective in any given situation. Therefore, learners must recognize the varying degree of certainty, possibility, or necessity that a modal can express. Changing the modal in a sentence can also change the degree of certainty that the speaker has about the situation. If the sentence changes to It might be easy to live so close the store, the sentence is still an inference, but the modal might expresses a much lower level of certainty: it might be easy to live near the store, but it might not be easy.
For example, the sentence It must be easy to live so close to the store is an inference that expresses a high level of certainty. Modals are used to indicate certainty, possibility, necessity, inference, or prediction. Phrasal modals use the common verbs be or have, which can make these modals easier for students to learn because they follow more familiar grammar rules. Phrasal modals look like phrases: be able to, have got to, be going to, etc. The other type of modals is periphrastic modals (Yule, 1998), more commonly known as phrasal modals. In short, modals do not follow the usual grammar rules for verbs and so fall into their own special category. For example, can is often used for the present tense, and could is used as the past tense of can however, could can also be used in other contexts to refer to present or future time (Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman, 1999). Each simple modal has a present and past tense form, but these tense forms do not function the way tense functions in other verbs. Simple modals are single words such as can, will, could, and would.
The forms of modals fall into two categories (Yule, 1998): simple modals and periphrastic, or phrasal, modals. We will examine the forms, meaning, and use of modals in more depth. For example, modals act more like the auxiliary verb do/does when do/does precedes a verb however, modals are different from do/does in that they do not change for tense or the subject’s number. Modals ( can, will, should, etc.), also known as modal auxiliaries, are difficult to learn because they seem to function like a verb but don’t follow the same rules.
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