Modality in Czech and English: Possibility particles and the conditional mood in a parallel corpus

The paper examines two kinds of modality exponents and their interlingual relationships, using an aligned parallel minicorpus of two contemporary Czech originals (drama and novel) and their English translations. It focuses on four most frequent Czech adverbial particles of possibility/approximation:snad, mozná, asi, nejspíše,and the Czech conditional mood marker by in the texts and their equivalents. It contrasts the findings with the equivalents in the latest and largest Czech-English dictionary. The results confirm that in either case the lexicographic description is insufficient both in the range of equivalents offered and their respective representativeness.