Semantics and Pragmatics https://semprag.org/index.php/sp <p>Semantics and Pragmatics, founded in 2007 and first published in 2008, is a Diamond Open Access journal published by the Linguistic Society of America.</p> Linguistic Society of America en-US Semantics and Pragmatics 1937-8912 <p>Articles appearing in Semantics and Pragmatics are published under an author agreement with the <a href="https://www.linguisticsociety.org/">Linguistic Society of America</a> and are made available to readers under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution License</a>.</p> A semantic universal for modality https://semprag.org/index.php/sp/article/view/sp.16.1 <p>This paper articulates a new semantic universal for modal expressions in natural language, dubbed the Independence of Force and Flavor (IFF). This property accommodates counterexamples to Nauze 2008’s proposed universal from variable-force variable-flavor modals (Bochnak 2015a,b) and attitude verbs (Močnik &amp; Abramovitz 2019), while still ruling out unattested modals. It may also be seen as a form of convexity applied to modals.</p> <p>EARLY ACCESS</p> Shane Steinert-Threlkeld Nathaniel Imel Qingxia Guo Copyright (c) 2023 Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Nathaniel Imel, Qingxia Guo http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 2023-01-05 2023-01-05 16 1:EA 1:EA 10.3765/sp.16.1