Re: "can" "able to" mood

Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:

> I think the difference is syntactic rather than semantic.  In English
> et sim, you construct it with helper verb + inf, so it's clearly not a
> mood.  But logically, the function seems more moodlike than aspectual,
> so I see no reason why it couldn't be a mood in some other lang...
I don't see why analytic construction would exclude moodhood?

FWIW, the name I learnt for "can", "may", etc in school was "modal auxiliaries".

 Andreas