The Modality of offer and Other Defeasible Causative Verbs

This paper is dedicated to verbs displaying the same ambiguity as offer in French and German. With agentive subjects, these verbs are used to denote an act performed with the intention of triggering a certain result. But this result does not have to occur for the sentence to be true, as shown by the noncontradictory continuation in (1a)-(2a). This is why we call these verbs ‘defeasible causatives’. With causer subjects, the same verbs entail the occurrence of the result, cf. the contradictory continuations in (1b)-(2b). The question raised is how one should handle this ambiguity in the semantics of these verbs. Following Gropen et al. (1989) and Beavers (2010), we call ‘prospective component’ the subevent that does not need to obtain for the predicate to be satisfied and ‘non-prospective component’ the subevent that must obtain for the predicate to be satisfied. The reading which entails the result will be called the ‘implicative’ reading, and the other ‘non-implicative’.1 Defeasible causatives are found in different semantic classes listed below. For some of them, the ambiguity has already been observed in the