This paper investigates how modal readings are affected by temporal interpretation in natural language sentences, by taking a close look at the Korean swu- construction which can receive multiple modal readings. Previous work on the swu- construction has attributed its modal readings to syntactic structures (e.g. Ha 2007; Chung 2007; Kim 2010) or lexical ambiguity (e.g. Mun 2016; Lee 2017). I discuss empirical and theoretical problems with these approaches, and provide a non-ambiguity analysis, following Kratzer’s (1981, 1991) view that distinct modal readings are contextually determined. I argue that the modal readings are determined by modal-temporal interactions at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Utilizing Condoravdi’s (2002) notions of Temporal Perspective (TP) and Temporal Orientation (TO), I provide a novel empirical finding that the non-epistemic readings are available only with future TOs while the epistemic modal reading is not temporally constrained in the swu- construction. I develop a compositional analysis of the temporal interpretation, and account for the (un)availability of (non-)epistemic readings in terms of the temporal constraints on the modal bases, along the same line as Condoravdi (2002) and Rullmann & Matthewson (2018). The analysis proposed in this paper is shown to be empirically and theoretically superior to the previous analyses of the swu- construction, and provides further crosslinguistic support for the theory of modal-temporal interactions proposed by Rullmann & Matthewson (2018).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.