Can and its sisters

There's a group of English language words that often cause problems to learners. These are: can, could, shall, should, will, would, may, might and ought. These words are in a way used to help compose sentences - like am, is and are for example. Consider: I can come tomorrow. Can, or any of its sisters, add something to the meaning of the sentence. However, they cannot stand alone in a sentence.

The problem is that they do not have one particular use. Their uses are many and the time element contained in them is not one that follows the regular behaviour of words like "goes" or "went". For "goes", for instance, we know that it expresses the present time and "went" the past. Nonetheless, does "could" mark a past time? The immediate answer to this question is: it depends on the context.

So now, how can one master the use of such words? That'd be the subject matter, i.e; content, of another thread.

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