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As Abraham (1990, 1991, 2005) has pointed out, aspect plays a crucial role, when epistemic modals (em) emerge out of root modals (rm). The present paper shows that the different aspectual preferences of those items are reflected by the differences in the configuration of the modal’s event structure: whereas rm turn out to be event modifiers, em are propositional modifiers. In technical detail, rm select infinitival complements involving an event argument and assign to them a interval posterior to utterance time. em, on the other hand, can combine with any non-finite complement that constitutes a licit proposition. This paper will discuss some data from German that shows that rm are indeed event modifiers since they (1) fail to embed predicates that lack event arguments and (2) are bound to complements with future orientation. The grammaticalisation of em then can be considered as a decline of the modal’s ability to modify events. This major change in its event structure causes the modal to extend its scope from events over propositions. This assumption is confirmed throughout by the fact that early em contained by the corpus exploited here only combine with predicates lacking event arguments, whereas rm never do. Finally, the theory offered here provides an interesting link between formal accounts and functional ones: Considering rm as event modifier, it explains why they are always “action oriented”, as commonly assumed by most functionalist approaches.

This paper investigates the variation of resultative serial verb constructions in Benue-Kwa languages. The main claim is that the variation can be explained assuming three versions of general lexicon rules which turn main verbs into complex predicates selecting for a second verb and attracting its arguments. Each language has a language specific version of these lexicon rules, enriched with language specific peculiarities to account for the specific behaviour of verbal inflection. The fact that not all of the lexicon rules do operate in each languages is another source of variation.

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As observed at various occasions, the usage of epistemic adverbs in information seeking questions is by far more restricted than the usage of epistemic adjectives. Starting from Lyons (1977) this contrast was motivated assuming that different types of epistemic operators come with different semantics and scope positions in the utterance, namely objective vs. subjective epistemic modality. However it is not possible to define clear classes of objective epistemic modal operators in terms of clear diagnostics. It will be shown here that the contrast of acceptability is more accurately explained in terms of locality and binding properties of the variable for the attitude holder rendering the epistemic judgement. If locally bound, epistemic modal operators can be embedded, if not, they are subject to much stricter conditions in order to be interpretable.