and so I will focus on this aspect of the volume, summarizing the remaining papers in my concluding remarks. The classical approach to modals from Kratzer treats them as existential or universal quantifiers over a contextually restricted set of possible worlds. Different flavors of modality—circumstantial, deontic, epistemic, etc.—correspond to different choices of contextually provided restric...

this paper attempts to indicate that the two conceptual categories of evidentiality and epistemic modality are distinct although they may look similar; thus their corresponding adverbs also consist of separate subcategories of adverbs. to attain this goal, different data were gathered both from written and spoken sources and analyzed mostly with the help of semantic considerations in the framew...

Communication facilitates coordination, but coordination might fail if there's too much uncertainty. I discuss a scenario in which vagueness-driven uncertainty undermines the possibility of publicly sharing belief. then show that asserting an epistemic modal sentence, 'Might p', can reveal speaker's uncertainty, and this may improve chances despite lack common ground. This provides game-theoret...

The object of the study is parenthetical constructions, represented in language by three types — modal, reflexive and appellative. Modal introductory constructions denote modal status a proposition. In epistemic units act as reflection marking. Appellative have an illocutionary function influencing addressee. purpose this article to analyze appellative with predicates one subclasses proposition...

In our pragmatic approach to research articles (RAs), we take a look at one of the main characteristics of academic writing: the use of modalized statements. Modalization, in the form of modal verbs, has been extensively studied by ESP researchers and practitioners. Most of their studies, however, have slightly touched upon the distinction between epistemic modality, which questions the certain...

It is standard practice in linguistic semantics to treat a modal like ought as expressing quantification over possible worlds that are selected and ranked according to certain contextual parameters (Kratzer, 1977, 1981, 1991, 2012). On this view, different modal flavors correspond to different values for these contextual parameters. In the following, we will call the particular modal flavor at ...

The weak epistemic modal operators might, possible, likely, and probable display embedding behaviors and scope interactions that are interestingly different from their logically stronger counterparts must and certain. I present two problematic sets of facts about these operators which have not received much attention in the literature. The first is that weak epistemic modals embed freely under ...

Kripke (1980) famously separates the metaphysical and epistemic modal domains, with supposed necessary a posteriori identity statements such as ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’, appearing to create an irreconcilable gap between conceivability and possibility. In response to this problem, David Chalmers (2002, 2004a, 2006) uses two-dimensional modal semantics (2DS) to claim that conceivability entails p...