On the event relativity of modal auxiliaries

Hacquard, Valentine

doi:10.1007/s11050-010-9056-4

Cited by 197 publications

(160 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…For an attitude, the representation targets information and priorities characterizing the attitude event-for instance, the subject's propositional beliefs DOX and desires DES, yielding a preordered set of doxastic alternatives DOX, DES . A central insight in Hacquard's (2006Hacquard's ( , 2010Anand and Hacquard 2014) work on modal and attitude semantics is the linguistic importance of a distinction between content-bearing and non-content-bearing events, and a notion of the content characterizing an event. A distinctive feature of attitude and speech events is that they are conceptualized as having informational content.…”

Section: Background and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our hypothesis about mood selection in French can be characterized in terms of a relation between the modal state determined by the predicate's modal backgrounds and the modal state representing the state of mind characterizing the event described by the predicate. To fix ideas I follow P&R in treating mood morphemes in complement clauses as licensed by mood features adjoined to the embedding predicate, as in (41) follow Hacquard (2006Hacquard ( , 2010 in treating modal backgrounds as relativized to events, and I assume that the predicate's individual arguments are introduced by thematic roles. SoM is a partial function from events e to preordered sets of worlds representing the informational-evaluative content of the state of mind characterizing e. More on these points below.…”

Section: Background and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I use the metalanguage predicate 'SoM' as a convenient shorthand for a relation between events and repre-sentations of informational-evaluative states; SoM isn't something lexically specific like modal backgrounds (cf. Hacquard's (2006Hacquard's ( , 2010 metalanguage 'con' predicate). So it is misplaced to ask about the state of mind "associated with" specific predicates, like one might ask about the modal backgrounds of 'want' versus 'hope', etc.…”

Section: Background and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Commitment and states of mind with mood and modality

Silk

2018

Nat Lang Semantics

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This paper develops an account of mood selection with attitude predicates in French. I start by examining the "contextual commitment" account of mood developed by Portner and Rubinstein (in: Chereches (ed) Proceedings of SALT 22, CLC Publications, Ithaca, NY, pp 2012). A key innovation of Portner and Rubinstein's (P&R's) account is to treat mood selection as fundamentally depending on a relation between individuals' attitudes and the predicate's modal backgrounds. I raise challenges for P&R's qualitative analysis of contextual commitment and explanations of mood selection. There are indicative-selecting predicates that are felicitous in contexts where there isn't contextual commitment (in P&R's sense); and there are subjunctive-selecting predicates that involve no less contextual commitment (in P&R's sense) than certain indicative-selecting verbs. I develop an alternative account of verbal mood. The general approach, which I call a state-of-mind approach, is to analyze mood in terms of whether the formal relation between the predicate's modal backgrounds and an overall state of mind represents a relation of commitment. Indicative mood in French presupposes that the informational-evaluative state determined by the predicate's modal backgrounds is included in the informational-evaluative state characterizing the event described by the predicate. The account provides an improved explanation of core mood-selection puzzles, including subjunctive-selection with emotive factives, indicative-selection with fiction verbs, indicative-selection with espérer 'hope' versus subjunctive-selection with vouloir 'want', and indicative-selection with commissives versus subjunctive-selection with directives. Subjunctive-selection with modal adjectives is briefly considered. The mood-selection properties of the predicates

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Section: Background and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Background and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Background and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Commitment and states of mind with mood and modality

Silk

2018

Nat Lang Semantics

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“…(5) MOD epistemic > TENSE > ASP > MOD root Hacquard (2010) attempts to explain Cinque's generalization without lexical entries with predetermined flavor and height; she proposes that auxiliaries have a single underspecified denotation, which can be inserted high or low in the structure. Under her analysis, modals come to have epistemic or root flavor because of their dependency on the immediately c-commanding event-binding functional head.…”

Section: (4)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We briefly discuss how our proposal relates to a broader theory of how modals acquire flavor, originating in the work of Hacquard (2006Hacquard ( , 2010. According to this approach, modals acquire their domain of quantification from the elements that they establish syntactic dependencies with i.e., their 'modal anchors'.…”

Section: Modal Anchorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On root modality and thematic relations in Tagalog and English

Abenina-Adar

Angelopoulos

2016

SALT

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The literature on modality discusses how context and grammar interact to produce different flavors of necessity primarily in connection with functional modals e.g., English auxiliaries. In contrast, the grammatical properties of lexical modals (i.e., thematic verbs) are less understood. In this paper, we use the Tagalog necessity modal kailangan and English need as a case study in the syntax-semantics of lexical modals. Kailangan and need enter two structures, which we call 'thematic' and 'impersonal'. We show that when they establish a thematic dependency with a subject, they express necessity in light of this subject's priorities, and in the absence of an overt thematic subject, they express necessity in light of priorities endorsed by the speaker. To account for this, we propose a single lexical entry for kailangan / need that uniformly selects for a 'needer' argument. In thematic constructions, the needer is the overt subject, and in impersonal constructions, it is an implicit speaker-bound pronoun.

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Modal Auxiliaries

Barbiers

Dooren

2017

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition

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In many languages modal auxiliaries such as English can , must , may , need , will , ought , want are ambiguous between two types of interpretations: epistemic and root interpretations. In the epistemic interpretation the modal expresses how likely it is that a proposition is true (for example, necessarily, possibly, probably true) while in the root interpretations the modal expresses the obligatoriness, permissibility, desirability, or possibility of a state or event. A central question in much syntactic research on modal auxiliaries has been whether this systematic semantic ambiguity corresponds to a syntactic distinction. A commonly accepted answer has been that in epistemic interpretations the modal verb is a monadic predicate while in root interpretations it is a dyadic predicate, typically a relation between a subject and an infinitival verb. This distinction between monadic and dyadic modal predicates has been modeled syntactically in various ways: (i) in terms of lexical argument structure, that is, as the distinction between raising and control verbs; (ii) in terms of different base positions in the array of functional heads making up the clausal spine, with epistemic modals being higher than root modals; (iii) in terms of a higher syntactic position for epistemically interpreted modals after raising at the level of semantic interpretation (LF raising); (iv) in terms of the nature of the complement of the modal. This chapter evaluates these proposals, drawing on data from, among others, English, Dutch, Icelandic, German, and Catalan and taking into account cross‐linguistic differences in the modal systems. One important conclusion is that the alleged correspondence between the epistemic/root distinction and the raising/control distinction is too simple, as there are sentences with root interpretations but a raising syntax. The chapter ends with a list of questions for future research.

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On the event relativity of modal auxiliaries

Cited by 197 publications

References 38 publications

Commitment and states of mind with mood and modality

Commitment and states of mind with mood and modality

On root modality and thematic relations in Tagalog and English

Modal Auxiliaries

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