Non-Propositional Modal Meaning

The semantics of evidentials is often analyzed as a subcase or a special case of modality in the recent formal literature (Izvorski, 1997; Faller, 2002; Speas, to appear; McCready and Ogata, 2005, among others). Moreover, some modern linguists consider the analysis of modality as a subcase of evidential or a speech act modifier (Papafragou 2000; Huddleston and Pullum 2002; Drubig 2001, among others; see also von Fintel 2005, for the summary of the recent discussion). My purpose in this article is to present a case study on the Japanese evidential morpheme darou. Darou is a sentence-final evidential marker that has a modal-flavor. It is an evidential marker in the sense that it makes reference to the speaker’s lack of evidence. Darou is also a modal expression in the sense that it involves a quantification over epistemic possible worlds. I go through the contexts where the use of darou is licit and claim that the semantics of darou indicates a bias toward the embedded proposition based on a particular modal base in the sense of Kratzer (1991). The data on embedded darou also show an interesting pattern from the shiftable indexicals in terms of point-ofview (c.f. Schlenker, 2003). In addition, I exhibit a peculiar distribution of darou with probability adverbs and phrases, which pertains to the discussion of levels of meaning in the literature on evidentials.