Within the linguistics literature it is often claimed that epistemic modality, unlike other kinds of modality, does not contribute to truth-conditional content. In this paper I challenge this view. I reanalyze a variety of arguments which have been used in support of the non-truth-conditional view and show that they can be handled on an alternative analysis of epistemic modality. # 2006 Elsevie...

In this paper we try to contribute to the body of knowledge about the acquisition of English epistemic modal verbs (e.g. Mary may/has to be at school). Semantically, these verbs encode possibility or necessity with respect to available evidence. Pragmatically, the use of epistemic modals often gives rise to scalar conversational inferences (Mary may be at school -> Mary doesn’t have to be at sc...

On the semantic level, epistemic modal operators encode modal force (necessity or possibility) and get interpreted against a conversational background which is a function from possible worlds into sets of propositions. In the case of epistemic modality, the conversational background is given by the speaker’s beliefs or the available evidence. Necessity in a given world encodes truth in all alte...

Academic discourse has always been the focus of many linguists, especially those who have been involved with English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and discourse analysis. Persuasion, as part of rhetorical structure of academic writing, is partly achieved by employing modality markers.  Adopting a descriptive design, the present study was carried out to compare the use of modality markers in terms...

This paper is concerned with some aspects of the semantics of modal verbs in English, in particular the phenomenon of modal subordination and the constraints on interpretation of successive modal sentences in a discourse. I propose a solution in the framework of dynamic semantics. The information state is taken to be a set of possibilities which are classiied according to the modal options extr...

Epistemic modals or predicates in English and Japanese are analyzed from three viewpoints: (i) reality of p (=propositional content), (ii) time of p, and (iii) causality of p, and three conditions are proposed: the Reality Condition, the Actuality Condition, and the Present Condition, which are in a hierarchical order. It is argued that when the epistemic modal expresses a cause inference, the ...