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...

Commitment should be understood as a dynamic and discursive category. This raises some important questions for the theory of grammar: to what extent do languages encode the dynamic and discursive aspects of commitment? At what level of analysis does this encoding take place? Which markers encode these aspects? In order to answer some of these questions two Italian adverbs expressing strong comm...

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 ...

The core question to be addressed when dealing with the future tense is whether it has a temporal or a modal interpretation. Both answers have been investigated in the literature 1. In this paper, we argue for treating the future as a modal and more specifically as an evidential. Unlike previous approaches, which treat it as a universal quantifier over times or world-time pairs 2, we claim that...