Word.ws English Dictionary

modal particle

modal particle noun: a word class that indicates the mood of an utterance.

Noun

modal particle (plural modal particles)

  1. A word class that indicates the mood of an utterance.
    • As far as we have been able to discover, no particles indicating the tense are ever used in conjunction with this or any of the other modal particles (except -il) , so that the time of the action must be gathered from the context.1843, Heinrich August Eduard Meyer, Vocabulary of the Language Spoken by the Aborigines of the Southern and Eastern Portions of the Settled Districts of South Australia
    • The modal particle da in Norwegian conditional clauses is a lexical item that is specialized for use in conditionals but it occurs in positive as well as in negative conditional clauses.2005, Thorstein Fretheim, “Is there a rigid boundary between semantics and pragmatics?”, in Working Papers ISK, number 2/2005, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, via National Library of...

modal particle meaning in Vietnamese

modal particle in Vietnamese

linguistic class
từ ngữ khí, ngữ khí từ

Forms of modal particle

pluralmodal particles

Origin of modal particle

From modal + particle, attested from the first half of the 19th century. Calque of German Modalpartikel.

Questions about modal particle

What does modal particle mean?
Modal particle means a word class that indicates the mood of an utterance.
What is modal particle in Vietnamese?
Modal particle in Vietnamese is từ ngữ khí, ngữ khí từ. See Modal particle meaning in Vietnamese.
What part of speech is modal particle?
Modal particle is a noun.
What is the plural of modal particle?
The plural of modal particle is modal particles.

Words near modal particle in the dictionary

  1. modal filter
  2. modal filters
  3. modal jazz
  4. modal logic
  5. modal logics
  6. modal particle
  7. modal particles
  8. modal scale
  9. modal scales
  10. modal shift
  11. modal shifts

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: modal particle (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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