Modals Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This monograph focuses on modality in Spanish. It presents the theoretical approach to this category formulated by Bohumil Zavadil and, consequently, it analyses its possible application to Spanish. We concentrate on specific areas of the Spanish modal system where two modal meanings combine. Theoretical analyses are combined with corpus-based studies concentrating on the choice of mood or contextual interpretation of selected constructions. We veryfied that areas where two modal meanings meet are a natural part of the Spanish modal system and that the combination of modal meanings has consequences on the mood selection.

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- Spanish, Modality, Corpus Linguistics, Morphosyntax
- by Amin Alinezhad
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- Pragmatics, Linguistic Anthropology, Arabic, Educational Psychology

In this paper, a more gradual view on grounding and subjectification is presented, which takes local and constructional factors of the specific modal verb into account. This entails that I prefer not to grant or deny the status of ‘grounding predication’ to a class of verbs, but to look at a number of properties which might enhance the degree of subjectification of a particular modal or even a particular form of the modal. I will concentrate on the German modals, but I believe that a more gradual view on grounding could also be defended for the English ones.

- by Aleksandra Janić Mitić
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- Semantics, Syntax, Possible World Semantics, Possible Worlds

According to a recent challenge to Kratzer's canonical contextualist semantics for deontic modal expressions, no contextualist view can make sense of cases in which such a modal must be information-sensitive in some way. Here I show how Kratzer's semantics is compatible with readings of the targeted sentences that fit with the data. I then outline a general account of how contexts select parameter values for modal expressions and show, in terms of that account, how the needed, contextualist-friendly readings might plausibly get selected in the challenge cases.

- by Janice Dowell
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- Philosophy Of Language, Meta-Ethics, Semantics, Contextualism
- by Patrick Duffley
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- Modals

Modals introduce quantification over possible worlds. For example, English must is a universal quantifier over worlds, while may is an existential quantifier. Modals also involve implicit conversational backgrounds, which vary depending on context . For example, must (along with many other modals) allows both epistemic and deontic readings, as shown in (1-2). 5 See section 4 below for further discussion, and for comparison of the conversational background of k'a with that of two other evidential clitics. 6 Abbreviations used: APPL = applicative, AUT = autonomous intransitivizer, CAUS = causative, CONJ = conjunctive, DEIC = deictic, DEON = deontic, DET = determiner, DIR = directive transitivizer, EMPH = emphatic, ERG = ergative, FOC = focus, FUT = future, HYP = hypothetical complementizer, IMPF = imperfective, INFER = epistemic-inferential, IRR = irrealis, LOC = locative, MID = middle intransitivizer, OBJ = object, OOC = out of control, PASS = passive, PERC.EVID = epistemic-perceived evidence, PL = plural, POSS = possessive, NEG = negation, NOM = nominalizer, REPORT = reportative, STAT = stative, SUBJ = nominative subject.

- by Henry Davis and +1
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- Cognitive Science, Semantics, English, Linguistics

This paper reports on the use of epistemic modal devices and evidentials in order to indicate perspective in modern English texts in the domain of history. The data has been excerpted from the Corpus of History English Texts (CHET), compiled as a subsection of the Coruña Corpus at the University of A Coruña (Spain) (Moskowich and Crespo, 2007). The corpus
is to be used with its own corpus tool, i.e. the Coruña Corpus Tool (CCT) for text retrieval and analysis. There is not an agreed position concerning the relationship between epistemic modality and evidentiality. In this paper, our approach is disjunctive (see Dendale and Tasmowski, 2001) in the sense that it stands as a distinct category from epistemic modality, even if functional overlapping may result from the pragmatic interpretation of particular samples. Conclusions will show that these devices have a strong textual potential and can, therefore, be used to develop argumentation.

- by Francisco J. Álvarez-Gil and +1
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- Historical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Argumentation, Evidentiality
- by PABLO ALBIZU
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- Dialectology, Syntax, Dative, Modals

This paper investigates modals in Linguistics and Engineering research articles. The study has two main objectives. The first one concerns the identification and categorization of modals used in research articles written in English by native speakers. The second objective is of a contrastive nature. We are much interested in measuring the use and function of modals according to register. For this study, we focus on material traditionally categorized as belonging to the realm of the humanities, e.g. linguistic research, and material categorized as belonging to the hard sciences, e.g. engineering research. Without further considerations as to the suitability of these categories, we want to explore on the motivations behind the use of modals in these branches of scientific thought. Our corpus was gathered for this purpose in mind with a selection of papers from the humanities and the hard sciences. Although corpus tools are fundamental for statistical representations, manual analyses are also important in order to detect pragmatic use of language denoting authority or lack of it. Our conclusions report on the motivations leading to the use of modals in relation to register.
Keywords: variation – modals – function – linguistics – engineering research papers – scientific thought – register.

- by Maria Luisa Carrio Pastor
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- English for Specific Purposes, Language Variation, Modals

Epistemic modal expressions like possible, likely, and certain routinely give rise to scalar inferences:
(i) It’s possible that we will hire Mary or Sue.
a. ↝ It’s possible that we will hire Mary
b. ↝ It’s possible that we will hire Sue
(ii) It’s likely that we will hire Mary or Sue.
a. ↝ It’s possible that we will hire Mary
b. ↝ It’s possible that we will hire Sue
(iii) It’s certain that we will hire Mary or Sue.
a. ↝ It’s possible that we will hire Mary
b. ↝ It’s possible that we will hire Sue
These scalar effects are usually classified and treated differently. The effect in (i) is labeled a ‘free choice inference,’ those in (ii) and (iii) ‘distributive inferences.’ Free choice and distributive inferences receive separate treatments in the literature. Distributive inferences are routine predictions of most standard accounts of im- plicature (Sauerland 2004, Fox 2007, among others), while free choice inferences are notoriously problematic (Kratzer & Shimoyama 2002, Fox 2007, Chierchia 2013 among others). We show that a degree-based semantics for modals can easily predict all these effects via the same mechanism and without making controversial assumptions. Our proposal dovetails well with (though does not require endorsing) recent probability-based semantics for epistemic modals (Yalcin 2010, Lassiter 2011, 2014, Moss in press, Swanson 2015), and hence can be seen as an indirect argument for analyses in this vein. We conclude by showing how the proposal can be extended to deontic modals, given reasonable assumptions about the form of a degree semantics for these modals.

- by Paolo Santorio and +1
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- Pragmatics, Semantics, Probability, Scalar Implicatures

The papers in Epistemic Modality together center around two questions:

- by Janice Dowell
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- Contextualism, Modality, Contextualism and relativism, Epistemic Modals

Here we focus on two questions: What is the proper semantics for deontic modal expressions in English? And what is the connection between true deontic modal statements and normative reasons? Our contribution towards thinking about the first, which makes up the bulk of our paper, considers a representative sample of recent challenges to a Kratzer-style formal semantics for modal expressions, as well as the rival views—Fabrizio Cariani’s contrastivism, John MacFarlane’s relativism, and Mark Schroeder’s ambiguity theory—those challenges are thought to motivate. These include the Professor Procrastinate challenge to Inheritance (the principle that ‘If ought  and  entails , then ought ), as well as Parfit’s miners puzzle regarding information-sensitive deontic modals. Here we argue that a Kratzer-style view is able to meet all of the challenges we’ll consider. In addition, we’ll identify challenges for each of those rival views. Our overall conclusion is that a Kratzer-style semantics remains the one to beat.
With this assumption in place, we then ask how we should understand the relationship between true deontic modal statements and normative reasons. Should, for example, we hold that the truth of such a statement entails the existence of a normative reason for some agent to comply? Here we argue that, in many cases, acceptance of Kratzer’s semantics for deontic modals leaves open for substantive normative theorizing the question of whether an agent has a normative reason to comply with what she ought to do.

- by Janice Dowell
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- Philosophy Of Language, Meta-Ethics, Semantics, Contextualism
- by Jim Wood
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- Dialectology, Dialects of English, Syntax, Morphosyntax

According to Kratzer's influential account (1981, 1991, 2012), epistemic "must" and "might" involve quantification over domains of possibilities determined by a modal base and an ordering source. Recently, this account has been challenged by invoking contexts of `epistemic tension': i.e., cases in which an assertion that "must p" is conjoined with the possibility that "not p", and cases in which speakers try to downplay a previous assertion that "must p", after finding out that "not p". Epistemic tensions have been invoked from two directions. Von Fintel and Gillies (2010) propose a return to a simpler modal logic-inspired account: "must" and "might" still involve universal and existential quantification, but the domains of possibilities are determined solely by realistic modal bases. In contrast, Lassiter (2016), following Swanson (2006, 2011), proposes a more revisionary account which treats "must" and "might" as probabilistic operators. In this paper, we present a series of experiments to obtain reliable data on the degree of acceptability of various contexts of epistemic tension. Our experiments include novel variations that, we argue, are required to make progress in this debate. We show that restricted quantificational accounts fit the overall pattern of results better than either of their recent competitors. In addition, our results help us identify the key components of restricted quantificational accounts, and on that basis propose some refinements and general constraints that should be satisfied by any account of the modal auxiliaries.

Recently, our judgments about disagreement cases have been accorded a significant evidential role in assessing rival semantic theories for deontic modal expressions. In particular, such judgments have been used to motivate rivals to the canonical, contextualist semantics on the grounds that it is insufficiently complex to explain them. This challenge rests on the assumption that a semantics should be able to represent our sense that two parties genuinely disagree at the level of what is said. If that assumption is correct, such judgments have a constraining role to play in assessing the comparative merits of the canonical contextualist versus revisionary semantic proposals.
Here I examine whether that methodological assumption is correct for a particular type of disagreement case, one that prima facie is animated by a dispute over what morality primarily requires. To that end, I consider a variety of disagreements, identifying their hallmarks and using those hallmarks to devise tests to distinguish them. With those tests in hand, I'll show that our disagreement case is one for this methodological assumption is most plausible. A central conclusion here is that rivals to the canonical view that add a parameter for information to the points of evaluation deontic modals are sensitive to undercuts the ability of the resulting views to explain disagreement between those who hold that our primary moral requirements are information-sensitive and those that don’t. If successful, the argument here turns an alleged pro-revisionary challenge on its head, by showing that some cases of disagreement undermine, rather than support, revisions to the canonical view.

- by Janice Dowell
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- Contextualism, Modality, Metaethics, Contextualism and relativism

- by Janice Dowell
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- Philosophy Of Language, Semantics, Contextualism, Conditionals
- by Friederike Moltmann
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- Ontology, Philosophy Of Language, Semantics, Formal Semantics

Against the background of standard possible-worlds semantics, this paper outlines a truthmaker approach (along the lines of Fine's truthmaker semantics) to the semantics of attitude reports and modal sentences. This approach is based on an ontology of attitudinal and modal objects, which are considered the primary bearers of conditions truthmaking or satisfaction.

Suppose I tell you "Sobel must be in his office". There are (at least) two distinct propositions I could be aiming to communicate. First, I could be remarking on his commitments, communicating, roughly, that every action open to him compatible with meeting those commitments locates him in his office. But, second, I could be remarking on what follows from the information available to me, roughly, that my information entails that he's in his office. A contextualist about modals holds that which proposition is expressed by a sentence containing a modal expression like "must" is a function of the context of utterance. A contextualist about modals in their epistemic use-illustrated by the second reading of my utterance-holds that the proposition expressed by such a use is likewise a function of the context of utterance. The canonical view of modal expressions in English, due primarily to Angelika Kratzer, is contextualist in this sense. The core idea is that necessity modals function like universal, possibility modals like existential, quantifiers over possibilities. In the case of epistemic modals, quantificational domains are restricted to worlds compatible with some body of information. Which body that is is determined by context.

- by Janice Dowell
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- Semantics, Contextualism, Contextualism and relativism, Expressivism

and from the brief but helpful comments of three referees for NELS. An anonymous referee once pointed something very similar to the EIP out to me in a referee report. Since those comments provided the occasion for the present paper, I... more

- by Daniel Skibra
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- Event Semantics, Modals, Deontic Modals

011014/> O n Kratzer's canonical account, modal expressions (like 'might ' and 'must') are represented semantically as quantifiers over possibilities. Such expressions are themselves neutral; they make a single contribution to determining the propositions expressed across a wide range of uses. What modulates the modality of the proposition expressed -as bouletic, epistemic, deontic, etc. -is context. This ain't the canon for nothing. Its power lies in its ability to figure in a simple and highly unified explanation of a fairly wide range of language use. Recently, though, the canon's neat story has come under attack. The challenge cases involve the epistemic use of a modal sentence for which no single resolution of the contextual parameter appears capable of accommodating all our intuitions. 2 According to the revisionists, such cases show that the canonical story needs to be amended in some way that makes multiple bodies of information relevant to the assessment of such statements.

- by Janice Dowell
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- Philosophy Of Language, Contextualism, Modality, Relativism

This paper presented the structural behaviour of a Submerged Floating Tunnel (SFT) for the Seribu Archipelago crossing under environmental loadings using the different cable configurations. The SFT is a tubular structure submerged in the water at a fixed depth, which features several advantages from the structural, economic and environmental impact points of view. In particular, it seems to be a suitable system for waterway crossings in seismicity zones, because the interaction with the water provides additional damping and inertia to the structural motion. In order to evaluate the SFT structural response to seismic events, response spectrum analyses were carried out considering for a ground multi-support excitation. The different cable system configuration was considered in this investigation. The static and dynamic analyses were carried out to find out the best configuration among them. Although they could not lead to definitive conclusions, the results gave useful indications abo...

- by I Gusti Putu Raka
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- Displacement, Modals, Stresses

Certain passages in Kaplan’s ‘Demonstratives’ are often taken to show that non-vacuous sentential operators associated with a certain parameter of sentential truth require a corresponding relativism concerning assertoric contents: namely, their truth-values also must vary with that parameter. Thus, for example, the non-vacuity of a temporal sentential operator ‘always’ would require some of its operands to have contents that have different truth values at different times. While making no claims about Kaplan’s intentions, we provide several reconstructions of how such an argument might go, focusing on the case of time and temporal operators as an illustration. What we regard as the most plausible reconstruction of the argument establishes a conclusion similar enough to that attributed to Kaplan. However, the argument overgenerates, leading to absurd con- sequences. We conclude that we must distinguish assertoric contents from compositional semantic values, and argue that once they are distinguished, the argument fails to establish any substantial conclusions. We also briefly discuss a related argument commonly attributed to Lewis, and a recent variant due to Weber.

- by John Hawthorne and +1
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- Modal Logic, Philosophy Of Language, Temporal and Modal Logic, Contextualism

In this paper, I present a novel compositional analysis of modal predicative superlatives, that is, predicative superlatives accompanied by modal adjectives such as possible, as that in (1). (1) Mary wanted to be the prettiest possible. I argue that they are elliptical bona fide degree-relative clauses denoting maximal degrees and whose semantic contribution is similar to that of Measure Phrases. This account will require a novel composition of the superlative which involves the formation of an ordered set and the selection of a maximal element. I argue that not only is this account able to derive their peculiar semantics (dispensing us from the ad hoc components that previous accounts posited), but it can also capture the morphosyntax of these constructions, especially in Romance languages, which turn out more informative than English in this respect.

- by Nicoletta Loccioni
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- Relative Clauses, Romance Languages, Modals, Degree Semantics

In this paper we examine the development of stance by comparing the use of certain distancing devices: impersonal pronouns, passive constructions, and attitudinal markers, especially modals, in the written narrative and expository texts of English speaking children, adolescents, and adults. The results suggest that even the youngest group use these markers differentially to distinguish the two text types. Thus, analyses center on the expository texts and the development of a more distanced, impersonal stance characteristic of this genre. For each of the target linguistic structures, we found developmental changes, both quantitative and qualitative. The results are discussed with reference to both cognitive and biological frameworks.

- by Anita Zamora
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- Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Pragmatics, Psycholinguistics
- by Viktor Elšík
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- Modality, Modals, Romani Language

We propose a new analysis of ability modals. After briefly criticizing extant approaches, we turn our attention to the venerable but vexed conditional analysis of ability ascriptions. We give an account that builds on the conditional analysis, but avoids its weaknesses by incorporating a layer of quantification over a contextually supplied set of actions.

- by Matthew Mandelkern and +1
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- Semantics, Ability, Modals

AWEJ Volume 2, number 2, April 2011 pp.209 -229
Modals Used in Interrogatives as Lubricants to Soften Directives and Commissives in English
Pro. Dr.Prashant Mishra
Department of English
Government S.V.P.G. College, Neemuch(M.P.), INDIA
Abstract
Speakers of English use certain tones, grammatical and lexical items to express themselves politely. Avoiding impositions on the hearers, providing options to them by respecting their liberties and creating a congenial environment are the factors which call into play appropriate use of politeness strategies. Modals in English are used in a large number of socio-cultural situations. They are also used to perform multiple speech acts and functions. Hence the study of modals cannot be confined to the semantic and formal analyses. Man is a social being and his utterances are often shaped by socio-pragmatic factors. Since communication is a goal-directed activity, politeness strategies are used by the speakers to avoid unpleasant commands and impositions. The present paper explores the use of modals in interrogative sentences as lubricants to observe Tact Maxim of Modals Used in Interrogatives as Lubricants politeness to avoid direct impositions on the hearer in directive and commissive speech acts in order to save an utterance from being impolite.
Keywords: Modals, Interrogatives, Politeness Maxims, Tact Maxim, Directives, Commissives

- by Arab World English Journal (AWEJ)
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- Interrogatives, Modals, Directives, Politeness Maxims

Some natural languages do not lexically distinguish between modals of possibility and modals of necessity. From the perspective of languages like English, modals in such languages appear to do double duty: they are used both where possibility modals are expected and where necessity modals are expected. The Nez Perce modal suffix o’qa offers an example of this behavior. I offer a simple account of the flexibility of the o’qa modal centered on the absence of scalar implica- tures. O’qa is a possibility modal that does not belong to a Horn scale; its use is never associated with a scalar implicature. Accordingly, in an upward-entailing environment, φ-o’qa is appropriate whenever there are accessible φ-worlds, even if indeed ALL accessible worlds are φ-worlds. In a downward-entailing environment, the flexibility of the o’qa modal is seen no more. Here, neither o’qa nor English possibility modals are associated with scalar implicatures, and the use of o’qa exactly parallels the use of English modals of possibility.
Given that o’qa is a possibility modal that does not contrast with a modal of necessity, just how do you talk about necessities in Nez Perce? Speakers translating into Nez Perce rely on a variety of techniques to paraphrase away expressions of simple necessity. Their strategies highlight an area where Nez Perce and English plausibly differ in the range of propositions they convey. The data cast doubt on any strong form of effability as a language universal.

- by Amy Rose Deal
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- Semantics, Scalar Implicatures, Modals, Semantic Variation

El objetivo de este trabajo es estudiar el uso de los mecanismos epistémicos y evidenciales para expresar opinión en el entramado argumentativo en textos sobre historia en inglés moderno. Los datos se han tomado del Corpus of History English Texts (CHET), compilado como una subsección del Coruña Corpus en la Universidad de A Coruña (España) (Moskowich y Crespo, 2007). El corpus posee su propia herramienta de análisis denominada Coruña Corpus Tool (CCT). No hay un consenso en cuanto a la relación entre la modalidad epistémica y la evidencialidad. En este documento, nuestro enfoque es disyuntivo (véase Dendale y Tasmowski, 2001) en tanto que se entiende como una categoría distinta de la modalidad epistémica, incluso si existen casos de superposición funcional. Las conclusiones muestran que estos dispositivos tienen un fuerte potencial textual y pueden, por lo tanto, utilizarse para el desarrollo de la argumentación.

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- by Janice Dowell
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- Computer Science, Philosophy, Philosophy Of Language, Contextualism
- by Jerry Sadock
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- Computer Science, Inflection, BASIC, Evidentiality

... In the deontic examples below, provided by Vieri Samek-Lodovici, the contrast between the scopes of potere and dovere with respect to the negation can be explained by assuming that we have Pol [NEG] here, and that deontic potere is a... more

- by Annabel Cormack
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- English language, Negation, Modals, English Language

This study investigates the use of suggestions in second language (L2) Turkish produced by first language (L1) English-speakers. The data were collected via a discourse completion test (DCT) comprising 10 situations as well as a collection of essays written to 'a friend'. Participants in the study were 15 advanced learners of L2 Turkish and 30 native speakers of Turkish.

- by Leyla Marti
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- Speech Act Theory, Suggestion, Modals

Computational linguistics methods are typically first developed and tested in English. When applied to other languages, assumptions from English data are often applied to the target language. One of the most common such assumptions is that a "standard" part-of-speech (POS) tagset can be used across languages with only slight variations. We discuss in this paper a specific issue related to the definition of a POS tagset for Modern Hebrew, as an example to clarify the method through which such variations can be defined. It is widely assumed that Hebrew has no syntactic category of modals. There is, however, an identified class of words which are modal-like in their semantics, and can be characterized through distinct syntactic and morphologic criteria. We have found wide disagreement among traditional dictionaries on the POS tag attributed to such words. We describe three main approaches when deciding how to tag such words in Hebrew. We illustrate the impact of selecting each of these approaches on agreement among human taggers, and on the accuracy of automatic POS taggers induced for each method. We finally recommend the use of a "modal" tag in Hebrew and provide detailed guidelines for this tag. Our overall conclusion is that tagset definition is a complex task which deserves appropriate methodology.

- by Yael Netzer
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- Natural Language Processing, Modern Hebrew Language, Modals, Part of Speech Tagging

One of the challenges confronted by language learners is to master the interpretation of sentences with multiple logical operators (e.g., nominal quantifiers, modals, negation), where different interpretations depend on differ- ent scope assignments. Five year-old children have been found to access some readings of potentially ambiguous sentences much less than adults do (Mu- solino 1998, Lidz and Musolino 2006, Musolino and Lidz 2003 among many others). Recently, Gualmini, Hulsey, Hacquard and Fox (2008) have shown that, by careful contextual manipulation, it is possible to evoke some of the putatively unavailable interpretations from young children. Their proposal is quite general, but the focus of their work was on sentences involving nomi- nal quantifiers and negation. The present paper extends these investigation to sentences with modal expressions. The results of two experimental studies reveal that, in potentially ambiguous sentences with modal expressions, the kinds of contextual manipulations introduced by Gualmini and colleagues do not suffice to explain children’s initial scope interpretations. In response to the recalcitrant data, we propose a new three-stage model of the acquisition of scope relations. Most importantly, at the initial stage, child grammars make available only one interpretation of negative sentences with modal expressions. We call this stage Unique Scope Assignment (USA).

- by jacopo Romoli and +2
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- Language Acquisition, Quantifiers, Modals, Scope Ambiguities

A semantic value assignment for a language L is a function [[ ]] from the expressions of L to entities of some kind. A semantic value assignment is said to be compositional for a particular n-place syntactic operation O just in case the... more

- by Juhani Yli-Vakkuri
- •
- Philosophy Of Language, Semantics, Modality, David K Lewis

If you are a semanticist, how best to understand the formal semantics of modal expressions is an issue that wears its interest on its sleeve. The issue, however, is of broader interest and importance to those concerned with other debates. One main task of metaethics, for example, is to understand ordinary moral and, more broadly, normative and evaluative discourse. Identifying the best semantics and pragmatics of deontic modal expressions in particular would make an important contribution to metaethicists' understanding of such discourse. Recently, some philosophers of language and linguists have wondered whether there are any expressions that require a relativist's distinctive treatment. Contextualists about some expression E hold that the contribution E makes to the determination of the truth-conditions of utterances containing E varies from context of use to context of use. Relativists about E, in contrast, hold that it makes an invariant contribution to the determination of truth-conditions on any occasion of use. Unlike standard semantic invariantists, however, relativists hold that the circumstances of evaluation that determine the truth of utterances containing E are more fine-grained than the standardly assumed possible worlds. What in addition is needed to determine a truthvalue, for the relativist, depends upon what E is. In the case of deontic modals, some relativists argue that that addition is a body of information: Deontic modal sentences are true or false at world, information pairs. 1 Assessing the prospects for relativism about deontic modals is crucial to answering the larger question of whether relativism is a viable research program. Central among the cases that are thought to motivate relativism are cases involving deontic modals whose truth requires that they are sensitive to a body of information in some way. 2 Parfit's miners scenario is such a case. A significant point of contention is whether a contextualist can account for our judgments about deontic modals in that case.

- by Janice Dowell
- •
- Philosophy, Philosophy Of Language, Semantics, Contextualism

Certain passages in Kaplan's 'Demonstratives' are often taken to show that non-vacuous sentential operators associated with a certain parameter of sentential truth require a corresponding relativism concerning assertoric contents: namely, their truth values also must vary with that parameter. Thus, for example, the non-vacuity of a temporal sentential operator 'always' would require some of its operands to have contents that have different truth values at different times. While making no claims about Kaplan's intentions, we provide several reconstructions of how such an argument might go, focusing on the case of time and temporal operators as an illustration. What we regard as the most plausible reconstruction of the argument establishes a conclusion similar enough to that attributed to Kaplan. However, the argument overgenerates, leading to absurd consequences. We conclude that we must distinguish assertoric contents from compositional semantic values, and argue that once they are distinguished, the argument fails to establish any substantial conclusions. We also briefly discuss a related argument commonly attributed to Lewis, and a recent variant due to Weber.

- by Juhani Yli-Vakkuri
- •
- Modal Logic, Philosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy Of Language
- by shaoyun long
- •
- Corpus Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, Modals

The lexical mapping of abstract functional words like modal verbs is an open problem in acquisition (e.g., Gleitman et al. 2005). In diachronic linguistics it has been proposed that learner mapping errors are responsible for innovations in the historical record (see Kiparsky 1974; Roberts & Roussou 2003, among others). This suggests that child error patterns should be consistent with historical changes. I studied the acquisition of modal lexemes by flavor (e.g., ability, epistemic) in order to assess the validity of this proposal in relation to the mapping problem. A preference task and a sentence-repair task were designed to address the question: Do children make structural mapping errors that, if left unchecked, are compatible with the innovations we see in the historical record (e.g., deontic > epistemic)? This study provides experimental data on the acquisition of modal lexemes by flavor and some long-awaited preliminary support for the hypothesis that child learners drive historical change.

- by Ailís Cournane
- •
- Experimental Linguistics, Modality, Language Development, Syntactic Change

This paper deals with the semantics and the syntax of modal constructions from a cross-linguistic perspective. It focuses on the syntactic representation of modal polyfunctionality, usually understood as the semantic alternation between root and epistemic readings. This ambiguity is not an idiosyncratic feature of the Germanic languages, as it is also found in other non-related language families. In this contribution, we broaden the empirical base by discussing the data taken from the volume ‘Modals in the languages of Europe. A reference work’ Hansen & de Haan (2009) which covers all major languages spoken in Europe. We discuss the notion of modal polyfunctionality and give a first account of cross-linguistic morpho-syntactic variation among modal constructions in the languages of Europe. We put forward the hypothesis that there is cross-linguistic evidence for the syntactic relevance of the distinction between epistemic-root polyfunctionality (EPI-ROOT) and alternations within root modality (ROOT). The relative semantic uniformity of modals contrasts with their structural diversity. We show that modals in the languages of Europe vary with respect to two features: i) the encoding of the subject and ii) inflectional categories. It is shown that modal constructions are not restricted to canonical subjects, encoded in the default (nominative) case, but also allow for cases other than nominative, or null subjects. We claim that canonical subject constructions are best suited to fully-fledged EPI-ROOT polyfunctionality, whereas quirky or null subjects tend to be restricted to alternations within the semantic domain ROOT. These categories need not be marked on the modal, but can be assigned to the lexical verb or the copula, which provides evidence for the claim that polyfunctionality is not restricted to ‘verbal status’. In the second part of the paper, we address the question: which syntactic features are cross-linguistically connected to polyfunctionality? The article focuses on a) the distinction between verbs and auxiliaries, b) raising vs control and c) coherence of verbal complexes. The analysis presents clear evidence for the tendency towards the loss of inflectional categories, but does not provide corroboration of the claim that modals form a syntactic category sui generis. We come to the conclusion that the distinction raising vs control is best suited to explain the syntactic prerequisites of polyfunctionality. We argue that modals with canonical subjects displaying full EPI-ROOT involve a raising structure, whereas modals with non-canonically case marked subjects displaying only ROOT alternations form control constructions.

- by Björn Hansen
- •
- Syntax, Linguistic Typology, Mood and Modality, Modals

GraphAnno is a configurable tool for multi-level annotation which caters for the entire workflow from
corpus import to data export and thus provides a suitable environment for the manual annotation of
modals in their sentential contexts. Given its generic data model, it is particularly suitable for enriching
existing corpora, e.g. by adding semantic annotations to syntactic ones. In this contribution, we present
the functionalities of GraphAnno and make a concrete proposal for the treatment of modals in a corpus,
with a focus on scope interactions. We have nothing to say about the specific categories to be annotated.
Its generic design allows GraphAnno to be used with various annotation schemes, like those proposed by
Hendrickx et al. (2012), Nissim et al. (2013) and Rubinstein et al. (2013). We will use generic category
labels from theoretical linguistics for illustration purposes.

- by Volker Gast
- •
- Corpus Annotation, Semantic Annotation, Modals