Ana Lúcia Pessotto | Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina - UFSC (Federal University of Santa Catarina) (original) (raw)

Papers by Ana Lúcia Pessotto

Modality in Underdescribed Languages

A história da Estação Primeira de Mangueira, uma das mais tradicionais escolas de samba do Rio de... more A história da Estação Primeira de Mangueira, uma das mais tradicionais escolas de samba do Rio de Janeiro

Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Pro... more Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Linguística, Florianópolis, 2015.Esta tese descreve um estudo teórico-experimental sobre o significado dos verbos Â podeÂ , Â deveÂ e Â tem queÂ . A análise foi feita a partir dos resultados de três questionários online com os quais foi coletado o julgamento intuitivo de falantes nativos do Português Brasileiro sobre sentenças com esses verbos. A análise teórica foi fundamentada no modelo formal de Kratzer (1981, 1991, 2012), onde os vários significados expressos pelos modais (epistêmico, deôntico, teleológico, bulético e quantos mais houver) são determinados por duas funções de contexto - base modal e fonte de ordenação - as quais mapeiam o mundo de avaliação a conjuntos de mundos, determinando o tipo de modalidade expressa e um parâmetro ideal estereotípico, deôntico, teleológico ou bulético que pode inclusive contribuir para a derivação da força modal (possib...

academic year, developing a research on mapping possibilities. On April 22 nd , 2013, she gave a ... more academic year, developing a research on mapping possibilities. On April 22 nd , 2013, she gave a brilliant conference about her research, which can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAzSSEPJI2A. It was a great pleasure to talk about modality with professor Kratzer, to attend her conference, and to follow her trajectory on modality. The interview aims at presenting a landscape of contemporary research on the field. As she says, in the end of this interview, there is so much to study! Dever and Weak Modality Recent researches on English modals like ought to, and on modals in other languages like Salish 4 , which seem to oscillate between necessity and possibility, opened new perspectives on modality. Some propose that those modals are weak necessity modals; others treat them as non-dual degree modals, which vary their meaning between possibility and necessity depending on the context. It seems to us that the auxiliary dever in Brazilian Portuguese has this chameleonic beh...

Working Papers em Lingüística, 2012

Revista da ABRALIN, 2011

Este artigo investiga a semântica de ‘pode’ e ‘podia’ no Português Brasileiro (PB). Com base na p... more Este artigo investiga a semântica de ‘pode’ e ‘podia’ no Português Brasileiro (PB). Com base na proposta de Kratzer (1981, 1991, 2008, 2010), mostramos que tanto ‘pode’ quanto ‘podia’ expressam possibilidade a partir do momento de fala, e que as diferenças entre eles nesses contextos (como a não-factualidade, a subjetividade e o desejo veiculados por ‘podia’ e não por ‘pode’) se devem à atuação do imperfeito, ausente em ‘pode’ e presente em ‘podia’. A proposta apresentada aqui é que ‘pode’ restringe os mundos de avaliação (base modal) aos mundos mais próximos ao mundo atual (do falante). Ao contrário, ‘podia’ não restringe os mundos da base modal, e o falante considera tanto mundos próximos quanto distantes do mundo real, já que evidências que suportam a factualidade da prejacente não são requisitadas tanto quanto com ‘pode’. A partir dessa não-restrição, com ‘podia’ o falante veicula uma possibilidade subjetiva, mais uma declaração de opinião do que uma descrição de mundo, de onde ...

Although the inauguration of Formal Semantics in Brazil dates back to the 1970s (BORGES NETO; MUL... more Although the inauguration of Formal Semantics in Brazil dates back to the 1970s (BORGES NETO; MULLER; PIRES DE OLIVEIRA, 2012), it was from the 2000s that the related literature, previously restricted to postgraduate studies, started to gain introductory volumes for undergraduate students in order to prepare and attract future semanticists (ILARI, 2001; PIRES DE OLIVEIRA, 2001; CANÇADO, 2012; FERRAREZI JUNIOR; BASSO, 2013). In this scenario, Para conhecer Semântica (Editora Contexto, 2018), written by the linguists Ana Paula Quadros Gomes (UFRJ) and Luciana Sanchez Mendes (UFF), takes place in the introductory bibliography on Formal Semantics produced in Portuguese. Based on internationally recognized proposals that seek to formulate explanations of universal application, the authors analyze Brazilian Portuguese (BP) phenomena with current examples and jovial language. The book brings fundamental theoretical concepts to the area and also reflects important developments in Semantic r...

Alfa: Revista de Linguística (São José do Rio Preto)

Revista Linguíʃtica, Sep 15, 2018

Este artigo descreve um experimento de leitura auto-monitorada realizado com adultos. O objetivo ... more Este artigo descreve um experimento de leitura auto-monitorada realizado com adultos. O objetivo foi verificar o tempo de reação (TR) e o efeito de contexto em sentenças com os modais 'deve' e 'tem que', em cenários estereotípicos e não-estereotípicos (KRATZER, 1981, 1991, 2012). Obteve-se TR em média 442ms superior para sentenças com 'deve' em comparação com 'tem que'; e uma média 495ms superior para o segmento com 'deve' em contextos não-estereotípicos. O resultado confirma coleta off-line anterior, ao mostrar efeito de contexto nos TRs, e traz evidência do processamento de linguagem para a variedade de interpretações de 'deve' intuitivamente captadas.

In this work I describe an experimental study on the meaning of the Brazilian Portuguese (BrP) mo... more In this work I describe an experimental study on the meaning of the Brazilian Portuguese (BrP) modal auxiliaries ‘deve’, and ‘tem que’ in which I show how they differ in meaning. The analysis was based on results obtained via three questionnaires with which the intuitive judgments of BrP native speakers were collected and statistically analyzed on RStudio (R Core Team, 2014) by using mixed linear regression models. The theoretical framework for the analysis is Kratzer’s formal model (1981, 1991, 2012) in which the meanings expressed by modal verbs (epistemic, deontic, teleological, buletic, etc.) are determined by two functions of context – the modal base and the ordering source. The results show that ‘deve’ is preferred in evidential contexts, while ‘tem que’ is preferred in non-evidential contexts (as defined in Pessotto, 2015). Moreover, the results show that ‘deve’ does not express necessity, but a sort of comparative possibility (Kratzer, 2012), while ‘pode’ and ‘tem que’ come up as the actual pair possibility-necessity in BP.
The investigation was motivated by the fact that to both ‘deve’ and ‘tem que’ is usually attributed the meaning of “necessity”, or “obligation”, which leads to the naïve conclusion that they are synonyms. Furthermore, the idea that ‘pode’ and ‘deve’ are the dual pair possibility-necessity still prevails in the analysis of modal verbs in BrP. However, an accurate inspection on our intuition and current language easily reveals that ‘deve’ and ‘tem que’ do not give the same semantic contribution. First, ‘deve’ and ‘tem que’ are used in different contexts: while ‘deve’ is preferred in contexts where the speaker makes an inference from available evidence, ‘tem que’ does not require evidence to be felicitously used. Second, a ‘deve-p’ sentence sounds “weaker” than a ‘tem que-p’ sentence: while ‘deve-p’ conveys that p is the best outcome, according to the context, ‘tem que’ conveys that p is the only possible outcome. Based on this intuitive inspection, the aim of the experiments was to evaluate the following hypotheses: (i) ‘deve’ is preferred in evidential contexts (which we define as contexts of stereotypical ordering), whilst ‘tem que’ is preferred in non-evidential contexts (deontic, teleological, and buletic ordering); (ii) ‘deve’ conveys a weaker modal force than ‘tem que’. I follow Pessotto (2015) and assume the evidential context as the one that projects a realistic modal base – epistemic or circumstantial – ordered by a stereotypical ordering source; and the non-evidential context as the one projecting a circumstantial modal base and non-stereotypical ordering sources, i.e., those that do not consider the normal course of the events, like deontic, teleological and bouletic ordering sources.
The first two questionnaires were design based on the principles of Matthewson’s (2004) methodology. In the questionnaire 1, in each of the 12 items, a sentence with ‘deve’ or ‘tem que’ was shown after a short story describing an evidential or a non-evidential context, and the participants should evaluate the sentence in the context by using a likert-scale from 1 to 5. In the questionnaire 2, the participant should choose between a ‘deve’ or a ‘tem que’ sentence according to the context. The results from both questionnaires confirmed the hypothesis (i) and showed a clear preference for ‘deve’ in evidential contexts and of ‘tem que’ in non-evidential contexts, which suggests, according to our analysis, a tendency of specialization for each modal. The design of the third questionnaire was based on Moesteller and Youtz (1990) and aimed to verify the hypothesis (ii). The participants were presented to sentences with ‘pode’, ‘deve’ or ‘tem que’ and should attribute a percentage of 50%, 60% to 80% or more than 90% (which according to Moesteller and Youts (1990) correspond to the expressions “possible”, “probable” and “certain”, which we assume to correspond to ‘pode’, ‘deve’and ‘tem que’, respectively.). The results confirmed the second hypothesis. They indicate that ‘deve’ is stronger than ‘pode’ (force of possibility) and weaker than ‘tem que’ (force of necessity). According to my analysis, ‘deve’ comes up as a gradual modal whose meaning can be derived from the notion of comparative possibility as described in Kratzer (2012), while ‘pode’ and ‘tem que’ represent the actual duality possibility-necessity.
With this work I believe to contribute to the understanding of modality by clarifying the meanings of these BrP modal auxiliaries and proposing a rearrangement of the BP modal system. Further work involves the investigation of online collected data.

References:

KRATZER, A. Modals and Conditionals. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2012.

MATTHEWSON, Lisa. On the Methodology of Semantic Fieldwork. International Journal Of American Linguistics, Chicago, v. 70, n. 4, p.369-415, out. 2004.

MOSTELLER, Frederick; YOUTZ, Cleo. Quantifying Porbabilistic Expressions. Statistical Science, Beachwood, v. 5, n. 1, p.2-34, Feb. 1990. Available in <http://www.imstat.org/sts/>. Accessed in: ago. 2014.

PESSOTTO, Ana Lucia. Força e Evidência: uma análise teórico-experimental da semântica de ‘pode’, ‘deve’ e ‘tem que’. Dissertation. Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Florianópolis, 2015.

PESSOTTO, Ana Lucia. Epistemic and gradable modality in Brazilian Portuguese: a comparative analysis of ‘poder’, ‘dever’ and ‘ter que’. ReVEL, special issue 8, 2014. [www.revel.inf.br/eng].

R Core Team. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. 2014. Available in http://www.R-project.org/, Accessed in Fev 2015.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the Brazilian Portuguese (BrP) modal auxiliaries ‘p... more This paper presents a comparative analysis of the Brazilian Portuguese (BrP) modal auxiliaries ‘poder’, ‘dever’ and ‘ter que’ in order to map their semantics. Its aim is to describe the role each one of these modals plays in modal gradation while following the Kratzerian approach for the semantics of modals in natural language (KRATZER, 1981, 1991, 2010). The paper assumes that ‘poder’ is the prototypical verb of possibility,while ‘dever’ and ‘ter que’ differ semantically not only in terms of force, but also in terms of the disparate conversational backgrounds (CBg) against which they can be interpreted. The paper concludes that ‘dever’ and ‘ter que’ modals exhibit a strong tendency for specialization, in line with Pires de Oliveira and Scarduelli (2008). Moreover, ‘dever’ sounds “weaker” than ‘ter que’ and stronger than ‘poder’ because, we will argue, ‘dever’ is a non-dual upper-end degree modal, inline with Kratzer (2012).
KEYWORDS: Modality; possibility; probability; necessity

Revista a ABRALIN - Associação Brasileira de Linguística, 2011

Este artigo investiga a semântica de 'pode' e 'podia' no Português Brasileiro (PB). Com base na p... more Este artigo investiga a semântica de 'pode' e 'podia' no Português Brasileiro (PB). Com base na proposta de Kratzer ( , 1991Kratzer ( , 2008Kratzer ( , 2010, mostramos que tanto 'pode' quanto 'podia' expressam possibilidade a partir do momento de fala, e que as diferenças entre eles nesses contextos (como a não-factualidade, a subjetividade e o desejo veiculados por 'podia' e não por 'pode') se devem à atuação do imperfeito, ausente em 'pode' e presente em 'podia'. A proposta apresentada aqui é que 'pode' restringe os mundos de avaliação (base modal) aos mundos mais próximos ao mundo atual (do falante). Ao contrário, 'podia' não restringe os mundos da base modal, e o falante considera tanto mundos próximos quanto distantes do mundo real, já que evidências que suportam a factualidade da prejacente não são requisitadas tanto quanto com 'pode'. A partir dessa não-restrição, com 'podia' o falante veicula uma possibilidade subjetiva, mais uma declaração de opinião do que uma descrição de mundo, de onde podem ser derivados pragmaticamente outros signifi cados, como a contrafactualidade e o desejo. Kratzer's ( , 1991Kratzer's ( , 2008Kratzer's ( , 2010 proposals, I will show that both 'pode' and 'podia' may express possibility at the moment of utterance, and the differences between them (such as non-factuality, desire and the subjectivity conveyed by 'pode' bot not by 'podia') are due 'P ' 'P ': U S -P 12 to the contribution of the imperfect, which is the case in 'podia' but not in 'pode'. The proposal presented here is that 'pode' restricts the worlds of evaluation (modal base) to those closer to the actual world. On the other hand, 'podia' does not restrict the modal base worlds, since evidences to support the factuality of the prejacent are not required as much as with 'pode'. From this lack of evidence, the speaker conveys a more subjective possibility, a declaration of opinion rather than a description of the world, from what other meanings can be pragmatically derived, such as the counterfactuality and speaker's desire.

Working Papers em Linguística

Proceedings of SULA V - Semantics for underrepresented Languages in Americas, 2010

celsul.org.br

Este trabalho introduz um estudo sobre a semântica de 'pode' e 'podia' no português brasileiro. O... more Este trabalho introduz um estudo sobre a semântica de 'pode' e 'podia' no português brasileiro. O objetivo é mostrar que, embora ambos expressem a idéia de possibilidade, 'pode' e 'podia' são semanticamente diferentes. A abordagem teórica que fundamenta a presente pesquisa é a semântica de modais baseada em teoria de mundos possíveis (Kratzer, , 1991 e os modais são tratados como a expressão da necessidade ou da possibilidade ). Neste artigo são apresentadas cinco diferenças sintático-semânticas entre 'pode' e 'podia': o tipo de modalidade expressa, a expressão de possibilidade forte vs possibilidade fraca, a interpretação de permissão, a aceitação de leitura contrafactual e a existência de projeção de tempo. Essas cinco diferenças levam a concluir que 'pode' e 'podia' não dizem o mesmo semanticamente e, além disso, apresentam estruturas sintáticas distintas. O final aponta para uma harmonia das diferenças.

Conference Presentations by Ana Lúcia Pessotto

Slides presented on the conference Semantics for Under-represented Languages in Americas - SULA9,... more Slides presented on the conference Semantics for Under-represented Languages in Americas - SULA9, held in the University of California - Santa Cruz, May 6th to 8th 2016

‘Dever’ como possibilidade comparativa Neste trabalho apresentam-se uma possibilidade de anál... more ‘Dever’ como possibilidade comparativa

Neste trabalho apresentam-se uma possibilidade de análise do significado do auxiliar modal ‘dever’ no Português Brasileiro (PB), com base no modelo teórico formal de Kratzer (1981, 1991, 2008, 2010) para a semântica da modalidade em linguagem natural. Nesse modelo, modais são operadores sobre proposições (ou conjuntos de mundos) e expressam noções graduais de necessidade e possibilidade. Sua interpretação depende do contexto, o qual contribui para o significado lógico da sentença modal. Esse trabalho faz parte do objetivo amplo de mapear o significado dos modais na fala do PB com base no modelo teórico formal.
Por meio da análise intuitiva de sentenças e da comparação com o auxiliar modal ‘ter que’, as hipóteses são: (i) ‘dever’ expressa uma possibilidade comparativa, ou seja, havendo duas proposições p e q, ‘deve-p’ expressa que p é uma possibilidade melhor do que q naquele contexto, sem excluir a possibilidade de não-p; (ii) ‘dever’ tem um componente evidencial, ou seja, ‘deve-p’ depende de haver evidências indiretas disponíveis, que componham um conjunto de informações contextuais a partir das quais se possa realizar uma inferência sobre p.
Exemplo: Ana vê o tempo nublado e abafado, com uma brisa fria. Ela, então, profere: (1) Deve chover logo. Codificados em (1) estão: o fundo conversacional (informações contextuais, conjunto de premissas) no qual ela se baseia para inferir que p; e a força modal de possibilidade comparativa. Tal significado pode ser explicitado por: dado que Ana sabe que as evidências observadas prenunciam chuva, ela infere que a melhor possibilidade a partir daquelas evidências é que chova. Já ‘Tem que chover’ é inadequada no cenário, pois expressa algo mais “forte” do que o contexto exige, além de não condizer com uma inferência baseada na simples avaliação das evidências.
Exemplo: um agricultor observa que há muito tempo não chove. O tempo está seco, não há nuvens. A colheita está ameaçada. Baseado nessas observações, o agricultor diz: (2) Tem que chover logo. Note que (1) é inadequada no contexto, evidenciando que a avaliação de evidências favoráveis a p faz parte do significado veiculado por ‘deve’, mas não de ‘tem que’. Note ainda que as premissas utilizadas pelo agricultor para proferir (2) são de diferente natureza: em vez de evidências disponíveis no contexto, ele se baseia em expectativas pessoais ou objetivos (a única maneira de salvar a colheita é chover logo).
Dessas observações, predizemos que: no mapeamento dos modais, ‘dever’ expressa uma possibilidade comparativa e ter que uma necessidade; além disso, ambos codificam premissas de diferentes natureza: enquanto ‘dever’ é essencialmente evidencial/epistêmico, ‘ter que’ é mais adequado a modalidades de raiz (bulética, deôntica, teleológica, etc.).

Modality in Underdescribed Languages

Working Papers em Lingüística, 2012

Revista da ABRALIN, 2011

Alfa: Revista de Linguística (São José do Rio Preto)

Revista Linguíʃtica, Sep 15, 2018

References:

KRATZER, A. Modals and Conditionals. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2012.

MATTHEWSON, Lisa. On the Methodology of Semantic Fieldwork. International Journal Of American Linguistics, Chicago, v. 70, n. 4, p.369-415, out. 2004.

R Core Team. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. 2014. Available in http://www.R-project.org/, Accessed in Fev 2015.

Revista a ABRALIN - Associação Brasileira de Linguística, 2011

Working Papers em Linguística

Proceedings of SULA V - Semantics for underrepresented Languages in Americas, 2010

celsul.org.br

‘Dever’ como possibilidade comparativa Neste trabalho apresentam-se uma possibilidade de anál... more ‘Dever’ como possibilidade comparativa

Gradable modality in Brazilian Portuguese In this paper I investigate the semantics of gradabl... more Gradable modality in Brazilian Portuguese

In this paper I investigate the semantics of gradable epistemic modality in Brazilian Portuguese (BrP) by comparing the modal verbs ‘dever’ and ‘ter que’. It is common assumption that both express necessity and are sociolinguistic variants. However, a close look in the uses of these verbs shows they are not synonymous. I argue they give different semantic contributions because (i) they mobilize different conversational backgrounds: ‘ter que’ is not compatible with epistemic modal bases while ‘dever’ is; and (ii) ‘dever’ works like a probability operator, expressing a grade of comparative possibility. I base my analysis on the relative and gradual kratzerian approach for modality in natural language, where the meaning of modals depends on contextually given parameters, namely, the modal base and the ordering source.
Apart from the sociolinguistic and morphosyntactic differences (‘dever’ conveys formality and is a defective verb), ‘dever’ and ‘ter que’ express different meanings because ‘dever’ is evidential, while ‘ter que’ is not. In other words, the use of ‘dever-p’ (p = embedded proposition) requires the availability and evaluation of (indirect) evidences towards p, from which an inference about p can be drown (example 1). A ‘deve-p’ sentence can also be complemented with a sentence warning to the possibility of p not to be the case, which is an evidence that ‘dever’ does not express necessity (example 2).
On the other hand, ‘ter que’ does not require the availability and evaluation of evidences, which blocks it to convey an epistemic inference, like ‘dever’ conveys (example 3). If ‘dever-p’ means that, according to the evidences available, p is a better possibility than non-p (without excluding non-p), ‘ter que-p’, on the other hand, does not allow this comparison and intuitively excludes non-p. Thus ‘ter que-p’ cannot be complemented with sentences warning to the possibility of p not to be the case (example 4). Also, ‘ter que’ is adequate to be uttered when there is no evidence towards p. One can use ‘ter que-p’ to express her wish, or a way to achieve a goal (example 5).
I conclude that ‘dever’ and ‘ter que’ differ in force and in the types of conversational background they are compatible with. While ‘ter que-p’ expresses necessity (in all worlds that come closer to the ideal determined by the ordering source, p is the case), ‘dever-p’ expresses that p is a better possibility than non-p: in the worlds that are closer to the ideal, the non-p worlds are not better ordered than the p worlds. Moreover, different from ‘dever’, ‘ter que’ is not evidential (not compatible with epistemic modal base), but conveys bouletic, deontic and teleological meanings. This proposal points towards a new line of investigation of BrP modals and indicates a specialization in this language modal system: ‘dever’ is preferably epistemic; ‘ter que’ covers the other kinds of modalities.

EXAMPLES:

Example (1): Context: Ana, Sam and Ria are planning to go to the restaurant X. Sam tells Ana he wants to drink whiskey. This is the first time they are going to the restaurant X, and don’t know the menu. Ana asks Ria if she knows if they serve whiskey in the restaurant. Ria answers:

(1) Deve ter (whiskey).
Deve to.have (whiskey).
‘There must/might be (whiskey)’.

Sentence (1) is naturally paraphrased as “É provável que tenha” (it is probable that have).

Example (2): consider the same context in (1).
(2) Deve ter (whisky), mas pode ser que não tenha (precisamos checar pra ter certeza).
Deve to-have (whisky), but may to.be that not have.SUBJ (we need to check to be sure).

The derivation of the meaning follows along this lines: we’re going to a restaurant; as far as we know about restaurants, they usually serve whiskey; so, since we’re going to a restaurant, there is a probability of there to be whiskey; but we’ve never been there before, so we cannot be sure. A ‘ter que’ sentence would not convey an inference in this situation, but the speaker’s position: If Ria utters ‘Tem que ter’, she conveys that she strongly wants there is whiskey there. A ‘ter que’ sentence is adequate to be uttered by Sam, since he is the one who declaredly wants whiskey.

Example (3):
‘Ter que’ is odd in a diagnosis scenario. Assume we are observing the weather conditions, which are indicating rain (dark clouds, sultriness, etc). According to our knowledge about weather conditions, we utter:
(3a) Deve chover. (‘Deve to.rain.’)
(3b) # Tem que chover. (‘Tem que to.rain.’)

Example (4):
(4) ?? Tem que ter (whisky), mas pode ser que não tenha (precisamos checar pra ter certeza).
??Tem que to.have (whisky), but may to.be that not have-SUBJ (we need to check to be sure).

Example (5): Context: Ria meets the new neighbor, talks to him for few minutes, and finds him interesting (for a date, for instance). He gives no clue about his marital status. Ria, planning to flirt with him, may utter:

(5) Ele tem que ser solteiro! (He tem que to be single, so I can ask him out, etc.)

Sentence (5) is not an inference about him being single (because Ria has no information from which she can infer that). She just hopes him to be single, so she can ask him out, etc., which yields a teleological reading.

REFERENCES:
Von FINTEL, K & GILLIES, A. 2007. An opinionated guide to epistemic modality. Oxford Studies in Epistemology 2: 32-62.
KRATZER, Angelika. 2010. Modals and Conditionals: New and revised perspectives. Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics. Oxford University Press.
LASSITER, Daniel. 2010. Gradable epistemic modals, probability, and scale structure. Proceedings of SALT 20. P 197-215.
PIRES DE OLIVEIRA, R.; Scarduelli, J. 2008. Explicando as diferenças semânticas entre ‘ter que’ e ‘deve’: uma proposta em semântica de mundos possíveis. Alfa Revista de linguística (UNESP. São José do Rio Preto. Online), v. 52, p. 215-236.
PORTNER, Paul. 2009. Modality. Oxford University Press.
YALCIN, Seth. 2010. Probability operators. Philosophy Compass. P 916-937.

This dissertation describes a theoretical and experimental study on the meaning of the verbs ‘pod... more This dissertation describes a theoretical and experimental study on the meaning of the verbs ‘pode’, ‘deve’, e ‘tem que’. The analysis was based on results obtained via three questionnaires with which the intuitive judgments of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) native speakers were collected. The theoretical analysis was based on Kratzer’s formal model (1981, 1991, 2012) in which the meanings expressed by modal verbs (epistemic, deontic, teleological, buletic, etc.) are determined by two functions of context – the modal base and the ordering source – which map the world of evaluation to a set of worlds, respectively determining the type of modality expressed and the ideal stereotypical, deontic, teleological or buletic parameter. This parameter can also contribute to the derivation of the modal force (possibility or necessity) in some languages. We assume that ‘pode’ is an existential quantifier over possible words (thus expressing possibility), and we turn to the analysis of the differences between ‘deve’ and ‘tem que’, both commonly associated to expressing necessity. We depart from the intuition that a sentence such as ‘tem que-p’ (where p is the sentence embedded under the modal) conveys that p is the single result according to the context, whereas ‘deve-p’ expresses that p is the best result given the context, presupposing a comparison among alternatives. The objective of the questionnaires was to evaluate the following hypotheses: (i) ‘deve’ is preferred in evidential contexts (which we define as contexts of stereotypical ordering), whilst ‘tem que’ is favored in non-evidential contexts (deontic, teleological, and buletic ordering); (ii) ‘deve’ conveys a weaker modal force than ‘tem que’. The hypotheses were confirmed with the collected data, which were statistically analyzed on RStudio (R Core Team, 2014) by using mixed linear regression models. We appealed to the theory to trace an explanation for the semantics of ‘deve’ e ‘tem que’, while using ‘pode’ as a force parameter. We concluded that whereas the modals ‘pode’ and ‘deve’ represent the duality ‘possibility/necessity’, being both existential and universal quantifiers on possible words, ‘deve’ is a gradual modal whose meaning can be derived from the notion of comparative possibility as described in Kratzer (2012). Moreover, the results showed a tendency of specialization of ‘deve’ for evidential contexts and of ‘tem que’ for non-evidential contexts.