This paper investigates how verbal modality is syntactically grammaticalized in Tigrinya (Ethiosemitic, Eritrea and Northern Ethiopia; SOV). We argue that modality is expressed through a weak epistemic auxiliary, as well as clause-embedding modal predicates that are lexically encoded as either a strong/necessity or weak/possibility modal. The modal base for these elements is contextually determined. Moreover, we demonstrate a correlation in the language between the force of the modal predicates and their argument structure (unaccusative/transitive). The weak modal predicate projects Subject Control constructions and the strong modal predicates project what we refer to as Exceptional Object Marking constructions (analogous to Exceptional Case Marking in English). Although this difference in argument structure is correlated with the modal force of a predicate, we suggest that the causal force behind the correlation is more plausibly tied to a difference in syntactic category, whereby strong modal predicates are v0 light verbs and the weak modal predicate is a lexical verb V0. The results of this paper contribute descriptively to our knowledge of the understudied language Tigrinya, as well as theoretically to the typological picture of the expression of modality cross-linguistically.