Ways of expressing modality. An introduction

This paper introduces the present volume, in which modal particles and other expressions of modality are studied from an interdisciplinary and crosslinguistic perspective, with a special focus on the comparison between German and Italian. The contributions address two broad dimensions: the interdisciplinary study of modal particles, including their grammatical, pragmatic, and multimodal properties, and the crosslinguistic investigation of modality, extending the descriptions and analyses beyond Germanic to Romance languages.