This paper contrasts two metaphysical accounts of modality and properties: Modal Realism which treats possible entities as primitive; and Strong Dispositionalism in which metaphysical possibility and necessity are determined by actually existing dispositions or powers. I argue that Strong Dispositionalism loses its initial advantages of simplicity and parsimony over Modal Realism as it is exten...

A striking feature of the traditional armchair method of philosophy is the use of imaginary examples: for instance, of Gettier cases as counterexamples to the justified true belief analysis of knowledge. The use of such examples is often thought to involve some sort of a priori rational intuition, which crude rationalists regard as a virtue and crude empiricists as a vice. It is argued here tha...

Invariantism proposed by [Braun, 2013] aims to maintain full identity of semantic content between all uses of ‘might’. I invoke well-known facts regarding diachronic change in meanings of modals to argue that invariantism commits us to implausible duplication of familiar processes of lexical semantic change on the level of “lexical pragmatics”, with no obvious payoff. [Braun, 2013] proposes an ...

The present paper presents a unified analysis of free and embedded indirect speech, with a specific focus on German. First we need a context-based analysis of indexicals (rigid/shiftable) which can capture their orientation in uses in indirect speech. The analysis includes a treatment of the German reportative subjunctive as a shiftable indexical tense. Indirect speech in embedded clauses of th...

In this document we describe the scheme used for labelling the open-source Ukwabelana Zulu corpus as well as the rules employed for the Part-of-speech (POS) tagger used to assign POS to morphologically analysed words. A detailed description of the Zulu morphology, the corpus itself and its generation is given in [2]. All resources can be downloaded from http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/Research/Machine...

The use of modal structures and motivation for action is used far more frequently during communication in Spanish than Russian, which corroborates the positive politeness concept helps increase rapport with interlocutor. In last decade, preferences speakers regarding constructions have shifted, giving way to lighter influence phrase structure. Specifically, a tendency alternatives imperative su...

Much attention has been paid to how digital technologies affect peacebuilding through the production of information, data and evidence. While research thus documented enable a sincere approach concerned with hurtful past present world ‘really’ is, can also play role in enabling subjunctive sensitivity for future worlds that ‘could’ or ‘should’ be. The article explores peacebuilding, subjunctivi...