Temporal constraints on (non-)epistemic readings: Further evidence from Korean

Abstract

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).