Tense on modal auxes

[nschneid]

I notice that tense features are missing on xpos=MD tokens in both GUM and EWT. As I understand it, they're usually categorized thusly:

Present	Past
can	could
may	might
shall	should
will	would
must
ought

Are Tense=Pres and Tense=Past not used because that would suggest the nonstandard lemmatizations could->can, might->may, etc.? Could we add the features without changing the lemmas?

(This is for the morphological category on the word. For clause-level features, it would make sense to mark clauses with will as Fut.)

[amir-zeldes]

I'm a bit ambivalent about this. Historically speaking, 'could' & co. in English are modal, and not past tense forms. Some Germanic languages, such as German, retain both the modal and the past tense form of these verbs, for example:

• kann - can (Pres)
• konnte - could (Past = was able)
• könnte - could (Modal)

In English, we do not have all three forms, and the historically modal form takes over the past function as well. In hypothetical uses, it therefore seems a bit questionable to label "could" as "Past", at least for sentences like:

• I could go if I wanted to

Meanwhile proper past use of "could" is rarer, for example habitual:

• I could go there every day when I was a child (=ability+past tense)

But I'm afraid we can't really disambiguate that automatically, so I would hesitate to just put Past on all uses of "could", even before getting into "will".

[nschneid]

Closing for lack of interest