Dissertation abstract

It is fairly standard to assume that a speech act consists of an illocutionary level of meaning, F , and a separate level of propositional content, p, such that F takes p as its argument, F (p). This paper is concerned (i) with establishing for one language, Cusco Quechua (CQ), to which of these two levels of meaning its evidential and its epistemic modal markers belong, and (ii) with developin...

This essay examines the interaction between the project of metamathematics and the cognitive science of concepts. The aim of metamathematics, i.e., the methodology of the deductive sciences, is to provide a precise characterization of the concepts figuring in rigorous, formal theories (Tarski, 1930/1983). The concepts at issue include those familiar frommetalogical inquiry – e.g., completeness ...

Epistemic modals are interesting in part because their semantics is bound up both with our information about the world and with how that information changes as we share what we know. Given that epistemical modals are dependent in some way on the information available in the contexts in which they are used, it’s not surprising that there is a minor but growing industry of work in semantics and t...

When I tell you that it’s raining, I describe a way the world is—viz., rainy. I say something factual, something whose truth turns on how things are with some aspect of the world. Likewise when I tell you that the weatherman thinks that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I say turns on a different feature of the world, namely, the weatherman’s state of mind. Likewise when I tell you that I th...

A dynamic semantics for epistemically modalized sentences is an attractive alternative to the orthodox view that our best theory of meaning ascribes to such sentences truth-conditions relative to what is known. I will demonstrate that a dynamic theory about might and must offers elegant explanations of a range of puzzling observations about epistemic modals. The first part of the story offers a...

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...

Grammaticalization deals with a diachronic process whereby a lexical word evolves into a grammatical word. The typological study recognized the common directionality of grammaticalization among different languages. Two common directionalities in grammaticalization are recognized in the case of the modal markers of possibility: (1) ability > root possibility > permission 1 and (2) ability> root ...