It is well known that the German modal verbs ‘sollen’ and ‘wollen’ have evidential (reportative) uses, illustrated in (1), but to date there is no satisfactory formal semantic account of these uses: Most existing accounts focus on unembedded occurrences of these verbs and derive incorrect predictions for the embedded cases. Based on corpus data and a survey study, it will be argued that ‘sollen...

This paper describes ongoing work on the choice of modal expressions in the generation of recommendations about courses of study within the B.A.-program of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. We focus our work on the German modal verbs müssen (must), können (can), the subjunctive form sollte (should), and dürfen (may). The idea is to combine insights from formal semantics into the meaning of modal ver...

I do not know how tall you are; I doubt that you starved as a child. My empirical evidence tells strongly against (1), by indicating that childhood malnutrition tends to reduce adult height. In contrast, (2) is logically trivial. How things actually are includes your actual height, whether or not it also includes your childhood starvation; how things would have been if you had starved as a chil...

Many new kinds of tool are being developed to take advantage of the increasing use of XML for expressing semi-structured information. One category of support is the provision of interactive tools that let people request and control the merging of disparate resources. However, these tools typically assume that the users have a clear idea of exactly how they wish to combine the resources, and tha...

We claim that weak necessity modals like English "should" are referential expressions denote pluralities of worlds, against the standard analysis, according to which all modal auxiliaries quantifiers. Weak pattern plural definites when tested for homogeneity effects (Löbner 2000, Križ 2016): they have scopeless readings under negation, tolerate exceptions in certain discourse contexts, and exhi...

We extend the notion of \only knowing" introduced by Halpern and Moses 11] to many agents and to a number of modal logics. In this approach, \all an agent knows is " is true in a structure M if, in M, the agent knows and has a maximum set of \possibilities". To extend this approach, we need to make precise what counts as a \possibility". In the single-agent case, we can identify a possibility w...