Children’s Acquisition of Epistemic Modality
نویسندگان
چکیده
On the semantic level, epistemic modal operators encode modal force (necessity or possibility) and get interpreted against a conversational background which is a function from possible worlds into sets of propositions. In the case of epistemic modality, the conversational background is given by the speaker’s beliefs or the available evidence. Necessity in a given world encodes truth in all alternative possible worlds, whereas possibility encodes truth in at least one alternative possible world (Hintikka, 1969; Kratzer, 1981, 1991; von Fintel and Gillies, 2004). On the pragmatic level, epistemic modal verbs typically give rise to scalar implicatures. Notice that (1b), even though logically compatible with (1a), typically excludes (1a) in conversation – hence it implicates (2):
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