USING CORPUS ANNOTATION FOR THE TEACHING OF MODAL MEANINGS IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH Jorge Arús Hita, Juan Rafael Zamorano-Mansilla, Julia Lavid López Universidad Complutense de Madrid 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Corpus Linguistics and Modality The present paper brings together two important areas of linguistic research: modality and corpus linguistics. To this we should add a third component functioning as a binding element between the former two: linguistics teaching. In particular, we look at a methodology for the teaching of modality by means of corpora. Each of these three fields has been the object of extensive research. Numerous studies have been devoted to the use of corpora for linguistics research (e.g. McEnery and Wilson 2004; McEnery, Xiao and Tono 2006). It is also possible to find volumes focused on the use of corpora for linguistic research associated with a specific theoretical approach (see, for instance, Thomson and Hunston 2006 for the exploitation of corpora within Systemic Functional Linguistics) and, as is to be expected, corpus-based research on specific linguistic aspects, such as the one which is our concern here, i.e. modality. Corpus-based work on modality is quite abundant. Suffice it to mention volumes like those by Krug (2000) on grammaticalization and modality; Nuyts (2001) on epistemic modality in English, Dutch and German; Hunston and Thomson (2001) on evaluation; most contributions in Facchinetti, Krug and Palmer (2003) on modality in contemporary English; Simon-Vandendergen and Karin Aijmer (2007) on English adverbs of certainty, several of the contributions in Hornero, Luzón and Murillo (2006); Cornillie (2007) on Spanish modality, as well as a number of more