A Novel Argument for the Modality of Will?

I consider two semantic issues concerning will-sentences: Stalnaker’s Asymmetry and modal subordination in Karttunen-type discourses. The former prima facie points to drawing a distinction between will and modal verbs, as it seems to show that will does not license non-specific indefinites. The latter points in the opposite direction, suggesting that will-sentences involve some kind of modality. To account for the data, I make a twofold proposal: will is semantically a tense, hence it doesn’t contribute a quantifier over modal alternatives; a modal feature, however, is introduced in the interpretation of a will-sentence through a supervaluational strategy universally quantifying over possible futures. That the universal quantification is not part of will’s lexical semantics is shown to have consequences that ultimately contribute to explain Stalnaker’s Asymmetry. Furthermore, that a modal quantification is present anyway in the interpretation of a will-sentence is shown to imply the availability of modal subordination in Karttunen-type discourses. Since the modal feature is not due to will’s semantics but to a presumably universal property of the underlying temporal model, the observed modal behaviour is not viewed as a contingent property of will, and modal interpretations of future tense markers are expected to be available cross-linguistically.