INTRODUCTION

A great deal of previous research has highlighted the important role played by aspect in the interpretation of modal readings (see, e.g., Abraham 2008; Abraham and Leiss 2008 ; Hacquard 2009, 2011; Kotin 2012). This paper constitutes an empirical contribution to this area. Ab initio, however, a remark concerning the perception of aspect needs to be made. The existing literature on the above-said categorial interaction treats aspect predominantly as a dichotomous viewpoint category, which differentiates events into perfective (completed) and imperfective (uncompleted). Yet, in this study, aspect is approached from a different perspective. This paper recognizes aspect as an inherent semantic feature of the verb-complement structure. This means that, following the Anglo-American aspectological tradition (Sasse 2002), the present analysis has adopted the Vendlerian (1957) concept of time schemata.

In addition to the above, this paper attempts to empirically investigate the interplay of the conversational backgrounds in the interpretation of the English modal auxiliary verb can and the Vendlerian lexical aspectual classes, within the scope of the modal's operation. The empirical analysis presented below was conducted on language samples excerpted from The Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies 2008-). Moreover, all the examples quoted in the descriptive parts of this paper have been taken from this corpus.

The present text is organized in the following manner. The paper opens with the current Introduction. Then, Section 2 defines the concept of modality as it is perceived throughout this study. What follows in Section 3 is a description of the Kratzerian (1991) semantic field of modal expressions, which constitutes the ground for the notion of conversational backgrounds. Section 4 introduces the concept of aspect in general, which is narrowed down to the Vendlerian concept of event time schemata in Section 5. Next, in Section 6, the discussion centers on an empirical investigation of the matrix predicates with the modal can followed by the bare infinitive of the main verb. Therefore, this part opens with a presentation of the studied language material, i.e., The Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies 2008–). After that, the paper discusses the empirical research, which is eventually wrapped-up with a Conclusions section.