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This study explores the semantic and pragmatic dimensions of epistemic and deontic modality in the Angkola language, a regional variety spoken in South Tapanuli, Indonesia. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Palmer, Halliday, and Brown and Levinson, the research identifies key modal expressions—bope (possibility), adong (certainty), songonna (inference), unang (prohibition), bole (permission), and harus (obligation)—and examines their roles in natural discourse. The findings indicate that epistemic modality is used to express different levels of belief and to moderate speaker commitment, while deontic modality encodes social norms, authority, and culturally embedded obligations. Modal expressions in Angkola also function as strategies of politeness, allowing speakers to adjust modal strength according to social status, context, and relational goals. Furthermore, modality serves as a reflection of core cultural values such as deference, social harmony, and the Dalihan Na Tolu system. By uncovering how modality indexes interpersonal and cultural meaning, this study contributes to the semantic-pragmatic analysis of under-documented languages and enhances understanding of the interface between grammar and culture.

Semantic modality, a core notion in linguistics, pertains to how language expresses meanings associated with possibility, necessity, and capability. In the last 20 years, research on semantic modality has significantly expanded, highlighting its interdisciplinary importance in linguistics, cognitive science, and computational technology. This study utilizes bibliometric analysis to examine trends, topic focusses, and significant contributions in semantic modality research from 2005 to 2024. A total of 3,025 articles obtained from the Scopus database were examined utilizing applications such as VOSviewer and Biblioshiny. The results indicate a significant rise in publications, especially post-2016, propelled by progress in natural language processing (NLP), deep learning, and multimodal technologies. Thematic mapping revealed “Human” and “Semantics” as essential themes in the research, emphasizing the amalgamation of language theories with cognitive and computational applications. Furthermore, terms like “multi-modal” and “cross-modal” highlight the increasing interest in multimodal interactions, which include text, visual, and auditory data. This study highlights the necessity for more regional and linguistic representation to improve cultural and linguistic variety, notwithstanding the dominance of China and the United States in the research environment. Significant problems were observed, including biases in datasets and deficiencies in the effective integration of cross-media modalities. This study offers an in-depth analysis of the progression of semantic modality research and presents essential recommendations for subsequent investigations. It emphasizes the necessity of diversifying datasets, enhancing interdisciplinary cooperation, and utilizing advanced AI models like GPT-4 and CLIP to enrich semantic comprehension across many cultural contexts. Plain Language Summary Unveiling Research Trends in Semantic Modality: A Bibliometric Analysis (2005-2024) Semantic modality, a core notion in linguistics, pertains to how language expresses meanings associated with possibility, necessity, and capability. In the last twenty years, research on semantic modality has significantly expanded, highlighting its interdisciplinary importance in linguistics, cognitive science, and computational technology. This study utilises bibliometric analysis to examine trends, topic focusses, and significant contributions in semantic modality research from 2005 to 2024. A total of 3,025 articles obtained from the Scopus database were examined utilising applications such as VOSviewer and Biblioshiny. The results indicate a significant rise in publications, especially post-2016, propelled by progress in natural language processing (NLP), deep learning, and multimodal technologies. Thematic mapping revealed “Human” and “Semantics” as essential themes in the research, emphasising the amalgamation of language theories with cognitive and computational applications.

In Mexican Spanish, ocupar (‘to occupy’) is often employed as a verb of need and necessity, with a similar use and denotation to those of necesitar (‘to need’). Despite it being widespread, very little has been written about this phenomenon. In this article, I provide a description of this novel meaning. This description is supported by a Twitter-based study on the distribution of the meanings of ocupar around three Mexican cities. The quantitative analysis of the data confirms the extensive use of ocupar as necesitar, although to varying extents; concretely, it was found to be most frequent in Monterrey. In qualitative terms, I demonstrate that ocupar as necesitar is more often used to express need (i.e., with a nominal complement) than modal necessity (i.e., as a semiauxiliary with a sentential complement). Lastly, I propose that the emergence of this meaning represents a case of ongoing grammaticalization, whose origin can be traced back to older meanings via semantic reanalysis

We present modality exclusivity norms for 400 randomly selected noun concepts, for which participants provided perceptual strength ratings across five sensory modalities (i.e., hearing, taste, touch, smell, and vision). A comparison with previous norms showed that noun concepts are more multimodal than adjective concepts, as nouns tend to subsume multiple adjectival property concepts (e.g., perceptual experience of the concept baby involves auditory, haptic, olfactory, and visual properties, and hence leads to multimodal perceptual strength). To show the value of these norms, we then used them to test a prediction of the sound symbolism hypothesis: Analysis revealed a systematic relationship between strength of perceptual experience in the referent concept and surface word form, such that distinctive perceptual experience tends to attract distinctive lexical labels. In other words, modality-specific norms of perceptual strength are useful for exploring not just the nature of grounded concepts, but also the nature of form–meaning relationships. These norms will be of benefit to those interested in the representational nature of concepts, the roles of perceptual information in word processing and in grounded cognition more generally, and the relationship between form and meaning in language development and evolution.

Spoken and written language processing streams converge in the superior temporal sulcus (STS), but the functional and anatomical nature of this convergence is not clear. We used functional MRI to quantify neural responses to spoken and written language, along with unintelligible stimuli in each modality, and employed several strategies to segregate activations on the dorsal and ventral banks of the STS. We found that intelligible and unintelligible inputs in both modalities activated the dorsal bank of the STS. The posterior dorsal bank was able to discriminate between modalities based on distributed patterns of activity, pointing to a role in encoding of phonological and orthographic word forms. The anterior dorsal bank was agnostic to input modality, suggesting that this region represents abstract lexical nodes. In the ventral bank of the STS, responses to unintelligible inputs in both modalities were attenuated, while intelligible inputs continued to drive activation, indicative of higher level semantic and syntactic processing. Our results suggest that the processing of spoken and written language converges on the posterior dorsal bank of the STS, which is the first of a heterogeneous set of language regions within the STS, with distinct functions spanning a broad range of linguistic processes. •A functional parcellation of the superior temporal sulcus is proposed.•The posterior dorsal bank encodes phonological and orthographic word forms.•This is the site where spoken and written language processing streams first converge.•The anterior dorsal bank represents abstract lexical nodes.•Several ventral bank regions are involved in higher level linguistic processing.

The morphological marking that distinguishes conditionals that are called “counterfactual” from those that are not, can also be found in other modal constructions, such as in the expression of wishes and oughts. We propose to call it “X-marking”. In this article, we lay out desiderata for a successful theory of X-marking and make some initial informal observations. Much remains to be done.

Modality exclusivity norms have been developed in different languages for research on the relationship between perceptual and conceptual systems. This paper sets up the first modality exclusivity norms for Chinese, a Sino-Tibetan language with semantics as its orthographically relevant level. The norms are collected through two studies based on Chinese sensory words. The experimental designs take into consideration the morpho-lexical and orthographic structures of Chinese. Study 1 provides a set of norms for Mandarin Chinese single-morpheme words in mean ratings of the extent to which a word is experienced through the five sense modalities. The degrees of modality exclusivity are also provided. The collected norms are further analyzed to examine how sub-lexical orthographic representations of sense modalities in Chinese characters affect speakers' interpretation of the sensory words. In particular, we found higher modality exclusivity rating for the sense modality explicitly represented by a semantic radical component, as well as higher auditory dominant modality rating for characters with transparent phonetic symbol components. Study 2 presents the mean ratings and modality exclusivity of coordinate disyllabic compounds involving multiple sense modalities. These studies open new perspectives in the study of modality exclusivity. First, links between modality exclusivity and writing systems have been established which has strengthened previous accounts of the influence of orthography in the processing of visual information in reading. Second, a new set of modality exclusivity norms of compounds is proposed to show the competition of influence on modality exclusivity from different linguistic factors and potentially allow such norms to be linked to studies on synesthesia and semantic transparency.

Neuronal studies have shown that selectively attending to a common object in one sensory modality results in facilitated processing of that object’s representations in the ignored sensory modality. Thus, the audiovisual (AV) integration of common objects can be observed under modality-specific selective attention. However, little is known about whether this AV integration can also occur under increased attentional load conditions. Additionally, whether semantic associations between multisensory features of common objects modulate the influence of increased attentional loads on this cross-modal integration remains unknown. In the present study, participants completed an AV integration task (ignored auditory stimuli) under various attentional load conditions: no load, low load, and high load. The semantic associations between AV stimuli were composed of animal pictures presented concurrently with semantically congruent, semantically incongruent, or semantically unrelated auditory stimuli. Our results demonstrated that attentional loads did not disrupt the integration of semantically congruent AV stimuli but suppressed the potential alertness effects induced by incongruent or unrelated auditory stimuli under the condition of modality-specific selective attention. These findings highlight the critical role of semantic association between AV stimuli in modulating the effect of attentional loads on the AV integration of modality-specific selective attention.

The issue of how abstract concepts are represented is widely debated. However, evidence is controversial, also because different criteria were used to select abstract concepts – for example, imageability and abstractness were equated. In addition, for many years abstract concepts have been considered as a unitary whole. Our work aims to address these two limitations. We asked participants to evaluate 425 abstract concepts on 15 dimensions: abstractness, concreteness, imageability, context availability, Body-Object-Interaction, Modality of Acquisition, Age of Acquisition, Perceptual modality strength, Metacognition, Social metacognition, Interoception, Emotionality, Social valence, Hand and Mouth activation. Results showed that conceiving concepts only in terms of concreteness/abstractness is too simplified. More abstract concepts are typically acquired later and through the linguistic modality and are characterized by high scores in social metacognition (feeling that others can help us in understanding word meaning), while concrete concepts obtain high scores in Body-Object-Interaction, imageability, and context availability. A cluster analysis indicated four kinds of abstract concepts: philosophical-spiritual (e.g., value), self-sociality (e.g., politeness), emotive/inner states (e.g., anger), and physical, spatio-temporal, and quantitative concepts (e.g., reflex). Overall, results support multiple representation views indicating that sensorimotor, inner, linguistic, and social experience have different weights in characterizing different kinds of abstract concepts.

In “Must … stay … strong!” (von Fintel and Gillies in Nat Lang Semant 18:351–383, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-010-9058-2), we set out to slay a dragon, or rather what we called The Mantra: that epistemic must has a modal force weaker than expected from standard modal logic, that it doesn’t entail its prejacent, and that the best explanation for the evidential feel of must is a pragmatic explanation. We argued that all three sub-mantras are wrong and offered an explanation according to which must is strong, entailing, and the felt indirectness is the product of an evidential presupposition carried by epistemic modals. Mantras being what they are, it is no surprise that each of the sub-mantras have been given new defenses. Here we offer them new problems and update our picture, concluding that must is (still) strong.