MAY/MIGHT I NJIHOVI SRPSKI EKVIVALENTI – NOVE TENDENCIJE U UPOTREBI
MAY/MIGHT AND THEIR SERBIAN EQUIVALENTS – NEW TENDENCIES IN THEIR USE

Summary/Abstract: Considering the results of recent linguistic research, it is obvious that English modal verbs are going through some changes related to their frequency, and also to specific meanings they denote individually. Therefore, the paper presents an attempt to study modal verbs may/might used epistemically and deontically, to establish their Serbian equivalents and possible new tendencies in their use. The contrastive analysis is carried out on the corpus consisting of 113 sentences in English and their translations into Serbian. Not only the frequency of use and the type of modality expressed by the modal verbs may/might are established, but also the structure they are used in is analysed, i.e. the number of negated modals and the number of constructions made of these modals with the perfect or progressive infinitive. At the end, the translation of modals is considered. Both typical and atypical examples are included and the choice of means of translation is commented on, with the role of context taken into account. Apart from a qualitative study referring to the modal verbs may/might in given contexts and their lexical – grammatical equivalents in Serbian, the paper also presents a qualitative analysis of the corpus. Might is almost 3 times more frequent than may and they both denote epistemic possibility in over 96% of sentences. As for their translation into Serbian, the pair may/might is most often translated with the adverbial “možda”.

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