Modal Auxiliaries in Sorani Kurdish

“Modality is concerned with the status of the proposition that describes the event” (Palmer, 2001: 1). This grammatical category is common to every language, shown by the help of some grammatical or lexical elements such as mood, auxiliaries, clitics, etc. because it’s a universal concept. This article deals with this notion in Sorani Kurdish from the viewpoint of modal auxiliaries. As this study is the first one on modal elements in this language, it has a descriptive sense, but in order to reach this description, the author tries to use some formal tests when interpreting the modal’s different modal meanings. These tests are gotten from Palmer (2001) and some work based on Kratzer (1977). It becomes clear that Sorani uses the auxiliaries “ʔeshe”, “bu:in” and “twanin” to show modality, each one stating three of the four main kinds of modality introduced by Palmer (2001); naming epistemic, dynamic and deontic, without conveying any meaning for evidential modality. The elements that help distinguish their different modal interpretations rest upon modal degrees (necessity and possibility) and their kinds (speculative, deductive and assumptive for epistemic modality; laws, norms and personal power as the sources for deontic modality, and desire and ability for dynamic) which all are determined by the context in which they occur.