USC graduate seminar (Spring 2018): This is a course at the intersection of degree semantics and modal semantics. Building on the recent surge of work on scalar (i.e. degree-based) modality, it aims to guide students to appreciate and investigate foundational, methodological and empirical questions in this paradigm. After introducing both standard degree semantics and standard modal semantics, we explore questions like: When is a degree-theoretic treatment appropriate? Should there be morphosyntactic requirements (e.g. explicit degree morphemes) that characterize expressions suited to such a treatment? Are there translations between some degree-theoretic semantic theories and some standard (non-degree based) theories?