Several recent works on modals and tense argue that epistemic modals and similar types of predicates are deprived of temporal properties. This article takes a different stand. Although epistemic modals typically express what may be dubbed “unchanging truths”, there exist examples to demonstrate that these types of predicates are still able to express a shift in temporal reference. This being th...

0. Preliminaries Evidentiality is a modal category that qualifies propositions in terms of the speaker's source of information (e.g., reported, inferential, hearsay). Compare epistemic modals, which mark the speaker's judgment of the factual status of the proposition, rather than the source of this knowledge. Evidentials are typically marked with verbal affixes, clitics, or particles. Languages...

The type of cluster exemplified in (1) is the most flexible one, consisting of auxiliary, modal and predicative verb. A perception verb in place of modal yields has a by and large equivalent flexibility. Throughout the paper, I use the following abbreviations for the above patterns: ∗For fruitful discussion and insightful comments, I want to thank the audience of the UCLA/University of Potsdam ...

Mensch: A German word which, in Yiddish, means “a good person”. A mensch is a particularly good person with the qualities one would hope for in a dear friend or trusted colleague; a gentleman. In 2000, Dave Swinney and Roelien Bastiaanse started a joint project on online sentence processing in Dutch and English. This project, entitled “The role of the verb in online auditory sentence processing...

This squib presents two puzzles related to an ambiguity found in For-infinitival relative clauses (FIRs). FIR’s always receive a modal interpretation even in the absence of any overt modal verb, and the modal interpretation seems to come in two distinct types, which can be paraphrased by finite relative clauses employing, respectively, the modal auxiliaries should and could. The two puzzles pre...

Protein-protein interaction plays an important role in understanding biological processes. In order to resolve the parsing error resulted from modal verb phrases and the noise interference brought by appositive dependency, an improved tree kernel-based PPI extraction method is proposed in this paper. Both modal verbs and appositive dependency features are considered to define some relevant proc...

This paper makes two claims about non-finite constituents headed by the affixes -tu/-i/-n/-Ø in Basque. First the semantics of these elements in modal contexts indicates that the standard analysis of these constituents as aspectual phrases is incorrect. We argue that -tu/i/-n/-Ø are merged as infinitival markers, which we take to be of category n. In perfective contexts the verb+-tu/-i/-n/-Ø ra...