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...

This paper argues that evidential clitics in St’át’imcets (a.k.a. Lillooet; Northern Interior Salish) introduce quantification over possible worlds and must be analyzed as epistemic modals. We thus add to the growing body of evidence suggesting that the functions of encoding information source and encoding epistemic modality are not necessarily distinct. However, St’át’imcets evidentials differ...

movement There are often curious misalignments between an expressive’s syntactic position and its semantic argument. To what extent is this like well-known scope-shifting phenomena? Intervention effects Expressives often induce strong interventions effects, though the reasons for this are only beginning to be understood (Kratzer 1999; von Fintel 2003; Kaufmann 2004). Theory design Expressives r...

The semantics of evidentials is often analyzed as a subcase or a special case of modality in the recent formal literature (Izvorski, 1997; Faller, 2002; Speas, to appear; McCready and Ogata, 2005, among others). Moreover, some modern linguists consider the analysis of modality as a subcase of evidential or a speech act modifier (Papafragou 2000; Huddleston and Pullum 2002; Drubig 2001, among ot...