Modality is the language user’s attitude towards the world. It is related to things such as certainty, possibility, willingness, obligation, necessity and ability.
Collocations of HAVE TO in the COCA corpus (9 tokens left and right): 1 WORRY (VVI ) 4009 2 CAREFUL (JJ ) 2155 3 ADMIT (VVI ) 1572 4 VIGILANT (JJ ) 176 5 RELEARN (VVI ) 33 One can guess there is a generally negative tone to this grammar structure from the above verbs […]
have (got) to INFINITVE Read More »
These are fixed expressions that are used to express a counterfactual or hypothetical situation in the past. They mean “if something had not happened, then something else would not have happened”. For example:
If it hadn’t been for your help, I would have failed the exam.
Had it not been for the storm, we would have arrived on time.
You can use different modals after these expressions, such as would, could, might. You can also invert the word order and omit “if”, as in the second example.
If it hadn’t been for / had it not been for + modal Read More »
