Could you perhaps give examples of what you mean by modality and modal remoteness? As far as conditionals go, I think there are several ways to talk about the past. Probably the most common is Third conditional, also known as past hypothetical or past counterfactual:

'If I hadn't become an English teacher, I wouldn't have come to Poland.'

Third conditional relates to hypothetical conditions and results in the past that are untrue - (but I did become an English teacher, and I did come to Poland).

First and Second both refer to the present or the future, so we can discount them for your purposes:

If it stops raining, I'll go out for a walk. (1st) - realistic / probable
If I wasn't (weren't) teaching in Poland, I'd like to be in Spain. (2nd) - unlikely / hypothetical

But there are a few other ways to use conditionals in the past that don't fit into the 1,2,3 pattern, for example - 'If I was in London, I stayed at the Ritz' - 'if' here really means 'whenever', and I call it Zero conditional in the past (Zero conditional is about general conditions - 'I usually walk to work, but if it's raining I take the bus'). And there are also others that use 'normal tenses' but where the result is not dependent on the condition being fulfilled:

'If that's what he thought, why didn't he say so?'
'If you were hungry, you should have said.'

But the fact you talk about modal 'remoteness' makes makes think you're talking about hypothetical situations. In EFL we call this use of past tenses the 'Unreal past', that's to say:

Past simple (I did) and continuous (I was doing) for present / future conditions (2nd)
Past perfect simple (I had done) and continuous (I had been doing) for past conditions (3rd)

There are also Mixed conditionals where, for example, a past hypothetical condition has a present result - 'If I'd worked harder at university, I might have a better job now', and less common, where a present (or more likely general) condition has a past result - 'If I wasn't (weren't) so lazy, I'd have worked harder at university'.

The standard forms in the result clause are - will (1), would (2) and would have (3), but we can use certain other modal verbs as well, as long as they're in the right form, for example - can (1), could (2), could have (3), may (1), might (2), might have (3) :

If I'd passed my exams, I could have become a lawyer.
If I'd become a lawyer, I might have made my name as a famous barrister.

Other uses of 'Unreal past' include:
'I wish / If only' - I wish I was (were) in Egypt (present), If only I hadn't said that' (past)
'I'd rather' - I'd rather you didn't do that (present), I wish you hadn't done that. (past)
Supposing, imagine etc - Supposing you were rich (present), Imagine you hadn't become a teacher. (past)

@Skeeter Lewis - but I'm in total agreement with you that the language people use is endlessly fascinating: that's why I contribute to this blog. But I prefer to treat it as an observer rather than as a judge.

@jayles - that's on my 'to do' list for my blog - but isn't that more a learner problem?

@Skeeter - let's get things in perspective. I teach foreigners English, so obviously their language is important to me. My children's language would be important to me. But how somebody else talks isn't really. Of course there are things that make me wince, but then so does very formal English, as I hinted at in my previous post. Other people's language is only 'wrong' according to the standards we were brought up with, which is probably Standard English, of one stripe or another, and has often changed in the meantime.

Much, much more annoying to me are those busy-bodies who post comments on somebody's so-called 'error' (which usually turns out not to have been one anyway). They literally make me see red. (And before anyone complains that I'm using using literally when I mean metaphorically, no, I'm using literally as an idiomatic intensifier - just as if I had said - they really make me see red - funny how nobody complains about really!).

And when I spoke of 'infinitesimal importance' I deliberately said in comparison to what else is happening elsewhere in the world, just as that professor put it in the context of the fate of the world. If you hear somebody talking of having ''correspondences with various people' it may grate a bit, but it hurts absolutely nobody. There are much more important things in life to get bothered about. And there are so many aspects of English that are much more interesting than bothering about the language people use.

Like checking out judgement. I imagine I've always spelt it the longer way, but I've never thought about it much. Burchfield (in Fowler 3) calls it 'the prevailing spelling in BrE' (except in legal language) and if you enter judgment into Oxford Dictionaries Online it automatically redirects to judgement.

But the shorter version is in fact more common in the British National Corpus, with 3217 judgment to 2441 judgement, which seems to fit with this Ngram graph comparing AmE and BrE (although that could be because of legal use). The difference between the two in BrE is certainly much closer than in AmE.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=judgement%3Aeng_us_2012%2Cjudgment%3Aeng_us_2012%2Cjudgement%3Aeng_gb_2012%2Cjudgment%3Aeng_gb_2012%2C&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cjudgement%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cjudgment%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cjudgement%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cjudgment%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0

What is clear though, is that it doesn't matter which you use (in BrE, at least).

Fowler himself prefers judgement (for etymological reasons), and says that we are all used to it from the Authorised and Revised versions of the King James Bible. So it came as somewhat of a surprise that many of the online versions of the KJV use the spelling 'judgment'. However, I've found a version of the English Hexapla comparing facsimiles of six major English versions of the Bible from 1380 to 1611 (with original spellings), and found Matthew 27:19, which has the line 'And the next day, sitting in the judgement seat, commanded Paul to be brought'. Wycliffe's bible doesn't mention the word judgement, but all the other five do, all with the longer spelling. So it looks as though Fowler was right.

http://books.google.pl/books?id=-WwKAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA816 (at the top of each column; see also the top of the next page).

@Skeeter - 'does it really matter?' - the quote I followed that with should have put that in context. Yes it matters to me what language I use, but compared to what else is happening in the world, the language of others is of infinitesimal importance.

Of course everyone can make their own judgement as to what words to use, but I prefer to leave the judgement of the language of others to the pedants. I find it much more interesting to observe how language works.

It's interesting that you will rarely hear this sort of 'judgement' of other people's language from many of those who are professionally involved with English: linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, EFL teachers etc.

What's more, many of those who criticise the language of others (very bad manners in my book, however refined they like to think themselves) often do so from a pretty limited knowledge of grammar, of the different varieties of English, or the history of the language.

Stan Carey quotes the example of scientist Ed Jong, who wrote a fascinating piece in Discover Magazine about how birds navigate, where he included this sentence:

'Some birds can sense the Earth’s magnetic field and orientate themselves with the ease of a compass needle.'

At first, the number of comments complaining about 'orientate' almost outnumbered those commenting on the science. Yet, in Britain, at least, orientate is a perfectly standard verb (it's the one I prefer), of which Burchfield, writing in the third edition of Fowler's says 'one can have no quarrel with anyone who decides to use the longer of the two words'.

One off these know-it-all commenters had said that the shorter verb was always better than the longer one. So why is it, as Carey pointed out, that Americans use 'burglarize' when there's the perfectly good 'burgle'?

@Skeeter - there are quite a few words out there I don't like and simply don't use. For example, I personally desperately try and avoid things like 'whom' and the impersonal pronoun 'one' - which just goes to show that one man's meat is another man's poison. But in the end does it really matter? This is professor of linguistics at the University of Pennysylvania talking about 'login' as a verb (as opposed to 'log in'):

"I probably wouldn’t use “loginned” or “loginning” myself, but not much in the fate of the world seems to depend on the question of whether these usages catch on or not."

And from an article by a self-confessed word nerd at Good Magazine:

"Even if a word bugs the living crap out of you, it’s still a word. Just ignore the small percentage of words that are annoying and focus on the enormous, fertile possibilities of English to create new words in any given situation or sentence. The fertility of English should be enjoyed."

These were both from a post by Stan Carey, writer of one of the most highly regarded linguistics blogs - Sentence First, which, coincidentally, I had just been reading (warning - highly descriptivist material):

http://stancarey.wordpress.com/2010/07/12/not-a-word-is-not-an-argument/

Whoops - A book by Cornelius Walker, republished in 2003.

@Skeeter - as a teacher I've learnt that 'never' is a dangerous word, and the same goes for 'does not exist'. See xavier_onassis's comment and jayles's reference (it's quite often used in astrology, it would appear, but also in linguistics - 'Some Old English graphemic-phonemic correspondences').

So now for some 'correspondence' trivia:

There's a prize-winning novel 'Private Correspondences' by Trudy Lewis, Professor of English at the University of Missouri, the title probably being a play on words (it does start with a letter, but also seems to be about connections).

And perhaps also a play on words, there's a long poem 'Correspondences: A Family History in Letters.' by the American-British poet Anne Stevenson.

There's also a book by Cornelius that seems to have first been published in 1876 as 'The Life and Correspondence of Rev. William Sparrow' . But in a facsimile edition of 2003l, it's Correspondences, for some strange reason. (Amazon sell it under both titles)

I'm not really erudite, I just checked in Google Books. But in essence, I agree.

@AnWulf - you seem to have stumbled across something interesting with that book you linked to: there are indeed quite a lot of references to psychoanalysis trainings and psychoanalytic trainings in British publications. This is from the College of Psychoanalysts UK:

"The College does, however, recognise that there is a need for a wide-ranging discussion among training-organisations in the United Kingdom on what constitutes a proper training of a psychoanalyst, the relationship of psychoanalysis to psychotherapy and how psychoanalytic trainings might be recognised by The College in future."

(I don't know why they use a hyphen, either!)

Vol 28 of the British Journal of Psychotherapy includes a paper: "Attention to Culture and Diversity in Psychoanalytic Trainings"

As far as I can make out this is quite a specific meaning of the word involving sessions with patients. This is from the abstract of that paper:

"The data were analysed thematically, and a principal theme that emerged was the way that psychoanalytical clinical trainings tend, for theoretical reasons, to explore ‘internal’ psychological issues at the expense of ‘external’ material issues such as ethnicity."

Ah. The data were!

Although most of the references on the first page of a Google search are indeed British, this is from the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center - "By having such a course we are reaching out to our community. We are meeting professionals where they are, in whatever trainings they have had."

@Chris B - Quite agree with you about touch base etc, in fact I did a post on my blog warning learners about these expressions a couple of years ago - the title being "Loop back to me and we'll touch base about this offline.".

I did this because it is very difficult for learners to tell the difference between business jargon, like "leveraged buyout" and business bullshit, like leveraging your career.

We had the expression 'can't see the wood for the trees' the other day, which after I had explained what a wood was in BrE, they worked out meant not being able to see the bigger picture, at which one of the students said "like the helicopter view", which surprised me somewhat. So I duly warned her that for many people this fell into the category of business bullshit. The one that gets me is the now ubiquitous 'going forward'.

Incidentally there are some humorous ones I've come across that I do rather like, for example smirting, al desco, deja-moo, multislacking and deceptionist, (all red-lined) but I've never heard them 'in the wild'.

@providencejim - I've been doing a bit of digging, and there's quite a bit in Faulkner, so I've added a section on him to my post, with some details and links. So thanks for the tip. Incidentally, while most of the 'Preview' views worked OK, there were another couple like "The Sound and the Fury".