This paper explores the notion of modality through a corpus of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) spontaneous speech corpus, based on the Speech Patterning Theory (CRESTI, 2000). Morpholexical modality indexes were identified in tone units within each corpus utterance. Through qualitative and quantitative methodologies, it was possible to conclude that: verbs are the major modality agent in BP and the epistemic modality is the most frequent type found. It was also observed that BP allows for multiple modal valency utterances and tone units.

O presente artigo pretende fazer uma revisão teórica dos principais conceitos relacionados à modalidade, das grandes visões teóricas relacionadas a esse assunto e das principais obras que trataram. Com isso, objetiva-se prover subsídios àqueles que se interessam pela manifestação linguística da modalidade.