Roberta Facchinetti, Manfred Krug, & Frank Palmer (eds.), Modality in contemporary English. Topics in English Linguistics 44. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. xvi, 396. Hb. $132.30.

This volume is a collection of sixteen papers, mainly arising from a conference in Verona, Italy, in 2001. There is a nine-page preface, though no concluding section, by the editors. The preface is mostly devoted to summaries of the individual chapters, except for an initial introduction of about one page. In it the editors aver that “all of these papers offer fresh methodological impetus to a variety of current linguistic debates” but also refer to “differences in theoretical perspectives, terminology and topics.” Differences in topics are of course desirable, but differences in core terminology are less so. An attempt on the part of the editors to comment on differences in terminology in studies on modality in general, or at least in those of the present volume, would have been welcome and might have enhanced the “methodological impetus” of which the editors speak. It would also have increased the interest of the volume for the reader wishing to gain a sense of the state of the art in the well-researched field of modality at the beginning of the new century.