Modality in Typological Perspective Fabrice Nauze Abstract: Modality is a broad linguistic concept. It is an umbrella term for all sorts of meanings and can be expressed by many different grammatical categories. Look for example at the following sentences. (34) a. The door must be locked. b. Maybe Jan is at home. The meaning of the verb should in sentence (34-a) is called deontic. The sentence expresses an obligation: that the door must be locked. The meaning of the adverb maybe in sense (34-b) is called epistemic. It is about conclusions to be made on the basis of knowledge/information. For example if we walk by Jan's house walk and we can see the light on we then can conclude (34-b). Other important meanings labeled as modality are capability (about the ability to perform certain actions) and goal-oriented modality (about possible or necessary actions to achieve a goal). Additionally, not only verbs and adverbs are used to express modality but also adjectives, lexical constructions, suffixes and enclitics (although the latter option is not present in the Dutch). The goal of this dissertation is to study modality from both a typological as well as a formal semantic point of view. The typological perspective includes the study of modal systems in different languages and aims at unraveling universal structures from those particular languages. I will for instance show that there is a universal restriction applying to combinations of modal elements. The results of this typological research will the be used as input to the formal semantic models. The dissertation is composed as follows. I start in the first chapter with a brief introduction of the main concepts and methods from the Typology. The second part of this chapter is dedicated to the main topic of this thesis, modality. I present a number of typologies of modality developed by (Palmer 2001), (Hakim 2004) and (van der Auwera and Plungian 1998) and choose in the end for the last typology as starting point for the study of modality in the second Chapter. The second chapter includes research on the modal systems of six languages: Dutch, Gbe (cluster), Korean, Lillooet, Turkish and Tuvaluan. I present for each language separately, first an overview of the modal elements and then tackle the problem of the modal combinations. In the last part of this chapter I summarize the results and come to the formulation of a semantic universal about the combinations of modal elements. The third chapter is about formal theories of modality. I mainly discuss the theory of Angelika Kratzer as published in (Kratzer 1976) to (Kratzer 1991). In this series of articles Kratzer present a context-dependent analysis of modality. This analysis still forms the backbone of most works in the semantic field on modality. With a view to some interesting examples I will also review some extensions of this theory formulated by (Brennan 1993) and (von Fintel and Iatridou 2004). In the fourth chapter I discuss some problematic examples for the analysis of Kratzer and its extensions with respect to modal combinations. In the fifth chapter I construct an update semantics framework for modality. I implement the basic principles of the typology of modality from the second chapter with the restriction from the semantic universal about the combinations of modal elements. The different types of modality operate at different levels in this semantic framework (admittedly behaving in very similar ways). The presented framework makes it possible to explain the limitation on combinations of modals and most of the problems of the standard framework in an elegant way. Another important point, finally, is that an explicit connection is made between goal-oriented modality and capability.