WoPoss - A World of Possibilities. An open access annotated corpus to study the diachrony of modality in the Latin language

Until now the study of lexical modality in the Latin language has focused almost exclusively on the synchronic level and mainly on verbs. The investigated corpus has also been limited to a small group of classical authors. Later sources or documentary sources, such as inscriptions, have been neglected. Moreover, no fine-grained annotation of modal types and subtypes has yet been attempted.The SNSF-funded project WoPoss - A World of Possibilities. Modal pathways over an extra-long period of time: the diachrony of modality in the Latin language (agreement n° 176778) aims to fill these gaps and to make available to the scientific community an annotated corpus which will be useful for research on modality or modality-related issues. As annotation progresses, data will be made available during the project lifespan (February 2019–January 2023). In this paper I want to present the main innovative features of the WoPoss corpus and of the WoPoss annotation.