The word typical is, I think, ill-chosen here. What the writers are saying at 122.2 might be better expressed thus;
We often use can to signify that an eventuality does occur—not always, not necessarily even usually, but from time to time.
At 339.10 there are really two different uses which should be distinguished:
May is used, particularly in academic and scientific contexts, to signify that an outcome is possible but not necessary:
Children of divorced parents may have difficulty with relationships.
May is also used in academic and scientific contexts to describe a range within which possible outcomes lie:
A female crocodile may lay 30-40 eggs.
The flowers may have five or six petals, pink or red in colour.
Either of these may uses can be expressed with can in colloquial registers. Colloquial can has largely (but not entirely) replaced may.
And (as you doubtless know) these do not exhaust the possible uses of either may or can.
Lost opportunities
The meanings of these are indistinguishable, except for a subtlety that I'll explain later:
We may have been able to save the victims.
We might have been able to save the victims.
The words "would" and "could" suggest both the past tense and the consequence of some imagined hypothesis, with either or both meanings being activated when suitable to the context. To use "would" here, you need to establish an imagined hypothesis. Then "would" indicates the consequence:
If only we had the antidote yesterday! We would have been able to save the victims.
It's possible to say "could have been able to", but "could" is the past tense of "can", so it already indicates ability. So, "could have been able to save the victims" is awkward. However, you could say:
If only we had the antidote yesterday! We could have saved the victims.
"Would have" and "could have" imply that the opportunity is now lost.
"May have", "might have", and "could have" don't require context to set up an imaginary hypothesis, but they do suggest that you have such a hypothesis in mind:
"We might have been able to save the victims."
"How?"
"The most recent antidote has been sitting in the refrigerator since yesterday."
"What? And no one tested it?"
An important difference
A very big difference between the may/might and would/could sentences is that the would/could sentences claim a high level of certainty about the hypothetical situation: the antidote is assumed to work. The may/might sentences lack that certainty. They suggest only that in the hypothetical situation (which might not even be stated yet), the antidote might have worked. "Would" corresponds to "will", and says that the antidote will work (in the imagined situation, which occurred yesterday). "Could" corresponds to "can", and suggests that the antidote can work (in the imagined situation, which occurred yesterday).
A subtle difference
"May have" mainly indicates uncertainty about what we could have done. "Might have" suggests both uncertainty and that the opportunity, if it even existed, is now lost.
This is English, so don't take that as a rule. Instead, memorize this well-known couplet (by John Greenleaf Whittier, 1856):
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
One more power of might
There's one more possibility with "might", which illustrates the flexibility of these words. "Might" can suggest that the victims actually were saved, or are actually in the process of being saved:
We might have been able to save the victims. I just read an article in a medical journal, which says that the antidote we tried yesterday was proven to work on mice in a recent experiment.
In other words, the antidote we tried yesterday might be working, right now. Since the uncertainty of the word "might" applies to our ability to save the victims, if we had that ability yesterday, then our efforts yesterday were successful, or are on the way to succeeding. Currently, we don't know (that's the uncertainty of "might"). Obviously, your listener will hear this meaning only if the victims are still alive.
You can also do this with "may have" and "could have", but those don't make the pun in the title of this section. Since "may have" has the least connotation of lost opportunity, it provides the clearest way to express optimistic uncertainty about the effects of yesterday's action: "We may have saved the victims."
Best Answer
English auxiliary verbs combine into more complex constructions according to wholly inflexible rules: the sequence is always
Each construction is thus marked with a specific auxiliary verb, HAVE or BE, and there is a ‘ripple’ effect: the form (present or past participle or infinitive) of each verb is determined by the preceding component.
Since a modal verb cannot be cast in the appropriate non-finite form, it cannot act as complement of a prior modal verb or auxiliary: except when two modals are conjoined (You can and should tell him), you can have only one modal verb in a clause, and it must be the finite first verb.
You occasionally hear paired modals in dialect speech, but this is emphatically non-standard and is generally taken to mark the speaker as uneducated.
The work-around for situations which call for "dual modalities" is to employ a periphrasis for the second modal:
A periphrasis like be able to VERB or need to VERB or be obliged to VERB in effect "restarts" the verb chain: a complex construction with its first element cast in the 'infinitive' may follow the to:
In this case, however, the first element in the new chain cannot be a modal, because modals cannot be cast in the infinitive.