Senses vs. context in the coding of the semantics of MAY and CAN

This brief post is a continuation on the theme of the previous post where I raise the issue of coding the senses of "may" and "can" most effectively for the purpose of statistical analysis. It provides a short update on my current line of thinking re the design an optimal coding system for the meanings of "may" and "can".

With regards to my project, I am at a stage now where I am about to start the annotation of the senses of "may" and "can" as featuring in my data and I am currently concerned with the issue of defining an appropriate degree of granularity for that stage of the coding. In other words, I need to establish how much of contextual information should be included in the coding of senses of the modals. Further, and with regards to the above, I'm now considering the inclusion of an extra variable (in addition to a SENSES variable) for the investigation of the behaviour of "may" and "can", namely that of CONTEXT. The motivation behind the inclusion of the CONTEXT variable would be to ultimately assess/quantify contextual weight on the semantics of the modals. Also, including a CONTEXT variable in the study would allow for the exclusion of 'contextuality' as a level of the SENSES variable. I would therefore approach, with SENSES, each occurrence of the modals according to their generally recognised "core" meanings. The advantages of dealing with the senses of the modals from the perspectives of both context and core meanings is that firstly, the number of levels included for each variable will be smaller than if only one variable was considered, which would facilitate the recognition of possible patterns in the data. Also, the two variables CONTEXT and SENSES could then be tested for possible mutual interaction which ultimately could be quantified statistically. Such a design of the data would also allow me to address a whole chunk of literature in the English modals that tries to assess what, semantically, belongs to the modals and what belongs to the context and the situation of utterance, and to what measure. To my knowledge, that line of work still remains to be experimentally challenged. Identifying/differentiating two meaning-related variables such as SENSES and CONTEXT could facilitate the possible inclusion of an experimental task that would aim to assess potential statistical results. I'm currently exploring the feasibility of that possibility.