an explicit classification of non-epistemic senses of tavan, shodan and bayestan based on Depraetere’s semantic-pragmatic model

In this paper we, first, briefly investigated some of the classifications of non-epistemic senses of tavanestan, shodan and bayestan by other researchers and observed that most of them, which mainly followed Palmer’s framework, have not proposed any explicit criteria for analysis and classification of senses of these modals and have only identified and described their various senses through exemplification. Their approach was found to be mainly semantic-syntactic. Even, those works which have moved away from Palmer’s ideas and have integrated pragmatics into their approach to the classification of the modals have not offered any explicit criteria for their classifications, either. Being aware of the limitations of the previous works, we introduced Depraetere’s (2014) semantic-pragmatic model which is composed of three layers (two semantic and one pragmatic) and classified the non-epistemic senses of Persian modals accordingly. The main advantage of this model is the use of a set of explicit criteria to classify the context-dependent meaning of the modals.Upon application, the model proved very efficient for a more systematic and objective classification of non-epistemic senses of Persian modals.