Results for ' modal verbs'

950 found
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  1.  49
    Modal Verbs and the Grading of Obligations.John E. Guendling - 1974 - Modern Schoolman 51 (2):117-138.
  2.  96
    A corpus-based study of modal verbs in Chinese–English governmental press conference interpreting.Yifan Zhang & Andrew K. F. Cheung - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
    This study investigates the use of modal verbs in Chinese–English government press conference interpretation. Modal verbs mark the speaker’s opinion of or attitude toward the event described in a sentence. Interpreters also use modal verbs to indicate the stances of the source language speakers. The use of modal verbs has been examined in such contexts as research papers, textbooks, and second language learners’ output; however, studies that compare differences in modal (...) between source and target languages in the context of interpreting are sparse. The investigation being reported is based on a comparable corpus—an original Chinese GPC and its English-translated version—and a parallel corpus—a translated English GPC and the original English version from the US. The results of the comparable corpus analysis indicate that the frequency of modal verbs in translated English is significantly higher than in original Chinese, in which only 40% of the modal verbs in translated English are consistent with their Chinese counterparts, while others are employed through amplification and value variation. The results of the parallel corpus analysis suggest that the increase of modal verbs in the target texts may help to achieve certain types of pragmatic functions in English. (shrink)
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  3.  20
    Modal verbs in complement clauses–interpretable or not?Jennifer Rau - 2007 - In Dekker Aloni, Proceedings of the Sixteenth Amsterdam Colloquium.
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  4.  15
    Facts, norms and dispositions: practical uses of the modal verb would in police interrogations.Derek Edwards - 2006 - Discourse Studies 8 (4):475-501.
    Two uses of the modal verb would in police interrogation are examined. First, suspects use it to claim a disposition to act in ways inconsistent with whatever offence they are accused of. Second, police officers use it in challenging the suspect’s testimony, asking why a witness would lie. Both uses deploy a form of practical inferential reasoning from norms to facts, in the face of disputed testimony. The value of would is that its semantics provide for a sense of (...)
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  5.  53
    The semantic roots of positive polarity: epistemic modal verbs and adverbs in English, Greek and Italian.Anastasia Giannakidou & Alda Mari - 2018 - Linguistics and Philosophy 41 (6):623-664.
    Epistemic modal verbs and adverbs of necessity are claimed to be positive polarity items. We study their behavior by examining modal spread, a phenomenon that appears redundant or even anomalous, since it involves two apparent modal operators being interpreted as a single modality. We propose an analysis in which the modal adverb is an argument of the MUST modal, providing a meta-evaluation \ which ranks the Ideal, stereotypical worlds in the modal base as (...)
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  6.  37
    A Corpus-Based Study of Modal Verbs in the Uniform Commercial Code of the USA.Xinyu Wu & Jian Li - 2019 - International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique 32 (2):463-483.
    Since the bilateral commerce between the USA and China changes greatly and Chinese government continues to reform and delegate power in the economic field, it is of importance to study the Uniform Commercial Code of the USA. The study specifically studies the features of modal verbs in the UCC through the comparison with the United States Code and Frown. With the help of Antconc, the distribution of modal verbs, the modal value of the three sets (...)
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  7.  29
    The Semantic-Pragmatic Analysis of Persian Modal Verbs Based on Papafragou's Model.Zohreh Vahedi & Jalal Rahimian - 2010 - Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 6 (1):67-116.
    The Semantic-Pragmatic Analysis of Persian Modal Verbs Based on Papafragou's Model This paper aims at analyzing the semantics and pragmatics of Persian modal verbs based on Papafragou's relevance-theoretic model. Persian modals are defined in terms of logical relations and propositional domains. According to the findings of the research, two of the three modals, namely, šodan and tavân express the logical relation of compatibility with respect to different propositional domains: the three forms mišavad, mišod and mišode are (...)
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  8.  46
    The inclusion of disjunction in child grammar: Evidence from modal verbs.Stephen Crain - manuscript
    This study is concerned with the acquisition of the disjunction operator, or, in English. Two mutually inconsistent claims have been made about the acquisition of disjunction. One claim is that the acquisition of the adult truth conditions for logical connectives, including disjunction, is a late and not fully universal, achievement. With particular reference to disjunction, the findings from several studies are interpreted as showing that only the truth conditions associated with exclusive-or are available to young children (e.g., Beilin and Lust (...)
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  9. Part iiib. Aspects of modality: A contrastive study of the semantic functions and pragmatic uses of modal verbs in English and chinese.Renzhi Li - 2009 - In Dingfang Shu & Ken Turner, Contrasting Meanings in Languages of the East and West. Peter Lang.
     
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  10.  8
    Problems in the Description of Modal Verbs: an Investigation of Latin. [REVIEW]P. H. Matthews - 1988 - Mnemosyne 41 (3-4):424-428.
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  11. The Inclusion of Disjunction in Child Grammar: Evidence from Modal Verbs.Andrea Gualmini - unknown
    This study is concerned with the acquisition of the disjunction operator, or, in English. Two mutually inconsistent claims have been made about the acquisition of disjunction. One claim is that the acquisition of the adult truth conditions for logical connectives, including disjunction, is a late and not fully universal, achievement. With particular reference to disjunction, the findings from several studies are interpreted as showing that only the truth conditions associated with exclusive-or are available to young children (e.g., Beilin and Lust (...)
     
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  12.  28
    Verbs, Time, and Modality.M. J. Steedman - 1977 - Cognitive Science 1 (2):216-234.
    In the first part of this paper it is argued that Vendler's classification of verbs into aspectual categories, called activities, accomplishments, achievements, and states, is better seen as classifying the meanings of sentences, and a recursive scheme for describing the aspectual character of sentences is presented.In the second part, this scheme is applied to the discussion of the epistemic and deontic meanings of the modal verbs must, will, and may. In particular, the relation between the “future” and (...)
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  13. On the semantic and pragmatic polyfunctionality of modal verbs.Johan Van der Auwera - 1999 - In Ken Turner, The semantics/pragmatics interface from different points of view. New York: Elsevier.
     
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  14.  52
    Evidential Modals at the Semantic-Argumentative Interface: Appearance Verbs as Indicators of Defeasible Argumentation.Elena Musi - 2014 - Informal Logic 34 (4):417-442.
    This contribution aims at providing an argumentative method to account for epistemic modality and evidentiality. I claim that these two linguistic categories can work as semantic components of defeasible argumentative schemes based on classification processes. This kind of approximate reasoning is, in fact, frequently indicated by appearance verbs which signal that the inferred standpoint is conceived by the speaker as uncertain due to the deceiving nature of perceptual data. Drawing from an analysis at the semantic-argumentative interface, the way in (...)
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  15.  49
    Problems in the Description of Modal Verbs. An Investigation of Latin. [REVIEW]Elizabeth Tucker - 1983 - The Classical Review 33 (1):145-146.
  16.  8
    Semantic clause types and modality as features for argument analysis.Patrick Saint-Dizier & Manfred Stede - 2017 - Argument and Computation 8 (2):95-112.
    This work investigates the role of semantic clause types and modality in argumentative texts. We annotate argumentative microtexts with situation entity (SE) classes and additionally label the segments that contain modal verbs with their modal senses. We analyse the correlation both of SE classes and of modal verbs and senses with components of argument structures (such as premises and conclusions) and their functions (such as support and rebuttal). We find interesting tendencies in the correlations between (...)
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  17. Truthmaker Semantics for Natural Language: Attitude Verbs, Modals, and Intensional Transitive Verbs.Friederike Moltmann - 2020 - Theoretical Linguistics 3:159-200.
    This paper gives an outline of truthmaker semantics for natural language against the background of standard possible-worlds semantics. It develops a truthmaker semantics for attitude reports and deontic modals based on an ontology of attitudinal and modal objects and on a semantic function of clauses as predicates of such objects. It also présents new motivations for 'object-based truthmaker semantics' from intensional transitive verbs such as ‘need’, ‘look for’, ‘own’, and ‘buy’ and gives an outline of their semantics. This (...)
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  18.  14
    Some Temporal, Aspectual, and Modal Features of the Arabic Structure la-qad + Prefix Tense Verb.Naphtali Kinberg - 1988 - Journal of the American Oriental Society 108 (2):291-295.
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  19. Cognitive Products and the Semantics of Attitude Verbs and Deontic Modals.Friederike Moltmann - 2017 - In Friederike Moltmann & Mark Textor, Act-Based Conceptions of Propositional Content: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 254-289.
    This paper outlines a semantic account of attitude reports and deontic modals based on cognitive and illocutionary products, mental states, and modal products, as opposed to the notion of an abstract proposition or a cognitive act.
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  20.  25
    Semantic clause types and modality as features for argument analysis1.Maria Becker, Alexis Palmer & Anette Frank - 2017 - Argument and Computation 8 (2):95-112.
    This work investigates the role of semantic clause types and modality in argumentative texts. We annotate argumentative microtexts with situation entity (SE) classes and additionally label the segments that contain modal verbs with their modal senses. We analyse the correlation both of SE classes and of modal verbs and senses with components of argument structures (such as premises and conclusions) and their functions (such as support and rebuttal). We find interesting tendencies in the correlations between (...)
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  21.  14
    Raising the Roof: Situating Verbs in Symbolic and Embodied Language Processing.John Hollander & Andrew Olney - 2024 - Cognitive Science 48 (4):e13442.
    Recent investigations on how people derive meaning from language have focused on task‐dependent shifts between two cognitive systems. The symbolic (amodal) system represents meaning as the statistical relationships between words. The embodied (modal) system represents meaning through neurocognitive simulation of perceptual or sensorimotor systems associated with a word's referent. A primary finding of literature in this field is that the embodied system is only dominant when a task necessitates it, but in certain paradigms, this has only been demonstrated using (...)
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  22. Intensional verbs and their intentional objects.Friederike Moltmann - 2008 - Natural Language Semantics 16 (3):239-270.
    The complement of intensional transitive verbs, like any nonreferential complement, can be replaced by a ‘special quantifier’ or ‘special pronoun’ such as 'something', 'the same thing', or 'what'. In this paper, I will defend the ‘Nominalization Theory’ of special quantifiers against a range of apparent counterexamples involving intensional transitive verbs.
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  23. The acquisition of modality: Implications for theories of semantic representation.Anna Papafragou - 1998 - Mind and Language 13 (3):370–399.
    The set of English modal verbs is widely recognized to communicate two broad clusters of meanings: epistemic and root modal meanings. A number of researchers have claimed that root meanings are acquired earlier than epistemic ones; this claim has subsequently been employed in the linguistics literature as an argument for the position that English modal verbs are polysemous (Sweetser, 1990). In this paper I offer an alternative explanation for the later emergence of epistemic interpretations by (...)
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  24. Only, emotive factive verbs, and the dual nature of polarity dependency.Anastasia Giannakidou - manuscript
    The main focus of this article is the occurrence of some polarity items (PIs) in the complements of emotive factive verbs and only. This fact has been taken as a challenge to the semantic approach to PIs (Linebarger 1980), because only and factive verbs are not downward entailing (DE). A modification of the classical DE account is proposed by introducing the notion of nonveridicality (Zwarts 1995, Giannakidou 1998, 1999, 2001) as the one crucial for PI sanctioning. To motivate (...)
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  25. A modal ambiguity in for-infinitival relative clauses.Martin Hackl & Jon Nissenbaum - 2012 - Natural Language Semantics 20 (1):59-81.
    This squib presents two puzzles related to an ambiguity found in for-infinitival relative clauses (FIRs). FIRs invariably receive a modal interpretation even in the absence of any overt modal verb. The modal interpretation seems to come in two distinct types, which can be paraphrased by finite relative clauses employing the modal auxiliaries should and could. The two puzzles presented here arise because the availability of the two readings is constrained by factors that are not otherwise known (...)
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  26.  21
    Structure and Grammaticalization of Serial Verb Constructions in Sign Language of the Netherlands—A Corpus-Based Study.Sascha Couvee & Roland Pfau - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9:355519.
    In serial verb constructions (SVCs), multiple independent lexical verbs are combined in a mono-clausal construction. SVCs express a range of grammatical meanings and are attested in numerous spoken languages all around the world. Yet, to date only few studies have investigated the existence and functions of SVCs in sign languages. For the most part, these studies—including a previous study on Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT)—relied on elicited data. In this article, we offer a cross-modal typological contribution to (...)
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  27. Depictive Verbs and the Nature of Perception.Justin D'Ambrosio - manuscript
    This paper shows that direct-object perceptual verbs, such as "hear", "smell", "taste", "feel", and "see", share a collection of distinctive semantic behaviors with depictive verbs, among which are "draw'', "paint", "sketch", and "sculpt". What explains these behaviors in the case of depictives is that they are causative verbs, and have lexical decompositions that involve the creation of concrete artistic artifacts, such as pictures, paintings, and sculptures. For instance, "draw a dog" means "draw a picture of a dog", (...)
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  28.  91
    Modality in language development: A reconsideration of the evidence.Anna Papafragou - unknown
    The set of English modal verbs is widely recognised to communicate two broad clusters of meanings: epistemic and root modal meanings. A number of researchers have claimed that root meanings are acquired earlier than epistemic ones; this claim has subsequently been employed in the linguistics literature as an argument for the position that English modal verbs are polysemous (Sweetser 1990). In this paper I offer an alternative explanation for the later emergence of epistemic interpretations by (...)
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  29. Certain Verbs Are Syntactically Explicit Quantifiers.Anna Szabolcsi - 2011 - The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 6:5.
    Quantification over individuals, times, and worlds can in principle be made explicit in the syntax of the object language, or left to the semantics and spelled out in the meta-language. The traditional view is that quantification over individuals is syntactically explicit, whereas quantification over times and worlds is not. But a growing body of literature proposes a uniform treatment. This paper examines the scopal interaction of aspectual raising verbs (begin), modals (can), and intensional raising verbs (threaten) with quantificational (...)
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  30.  6
    Modality and Mood in Formal Semantics.Stefan Kaufmann & Magdalena Kaufmann - 2016 - In Jan Nuyts & Johan van der Auwera, The Oxford Handbook of Modality and Mood. Oxford University Press UK.
    This chapter presents a survey of the most important features of the formal semantic analysis of modality and mood. It first focuses on modality as exemplified by the modal verbs, presenting the main concepts and introducing the most common basic formal apparatus used in its analysis, and surveying some of the issues that are currently central in the field. The chapter then turns to the treatment of mood, discussing formal semantic treatments of both “sentential mood” and “verbal mood”. (...)
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  31. Tense and Modals.Tim Stowell - unknown
    The class of true modal verbs in English is usually understood to include auxiliary verbs conveying possibility and necessity (including predictive future) that lack non-finite morphological forms; from a syntactic perspective, these verbs occur only in finite clauses (as opposed to infinitives or gerunds). Nevertheless the true modals do not inflect for third-person singular agreement, unlike normal present-tense verbs. When they are negated, true modals always precede the negative particle not, regardless of their understood scope (...)
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  32.  49
    Objects and Modalities: A Study in the Semantics of Modal Logic.Tero Tulenheimo - 2017 - Cham, Switzerland: Springer Verlag.
    This book develops a novel generalization of possible world semantics, called ‘world line semantics’, which recognizes worlds and links between world-bound objects (world lines) as mutually independent aspects of modal semantics. Addressing a wide range of questions vital for contemporary debates in logic and philosophy of language and offering new tools for theoretical linguistics and knowledge representation, the book proposes a radically new paradigm in modal semantics. This framework is motivated philosophically, viewing a structure of world lines as (...)
  33. Temporally opaque arguments in verbs of creation.Arnim von Stechow - unknown
    Summary Verbs of creation (create, make, paint) are not transparent. The object created does not exist during the event time but only thereafter. We may call this type of opacity temporal opacity. I is to be distinguished from modal opacity, which is found in verbs like owe or seek. (Dowty, 1979) offers two analyses of creation verbs. One analysis predicts that no object of the sort created exists before the time of the creation. The other analysis (...)
     
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  34.  51
    Linguistic Patterns of Modality in UN Resolutions: The Role of Shall, Should, and May in Security Council Resolutions Relating to the Second Gulf War.Giuseppina Scotto di Carlo - 2017 - International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique 30 (2):223-244.
    This paper will discuss the role of modality in UN Security Council resolutions. As a work in progress on whether the use of strategic vagueness in UN resolutions has contributed to the outbreak of the second Gulf war, this work proposes a qualitative and quantitative analysis on the role of vagueness of the central modal verbs shall, should, and may in the institutional language of the UN, drawing upon Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach and Jenkins, Gotti, and Trosborg's theories on (...)
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  35.  12
    The Relatıon Of Negatıve Morpheme “-ma” With Modals And The Problem Of Naming The Conjugation Of Negative Verbs.Fevzi Karademi̇r - 2009 - Journal of Turkish Studies 4:1343-1374.
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  36.  17
    Acquisition and Development of Verb/Predicate Chaining in Hebrew.Ruth Berman & Lyle Lustigman - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
    The study considers development and use of verb/predicate chaining constructions by Hebrew speakers from early childhood to adolescence, based on analysis of authentic conversational and narrative corpora. Three types of such constructions are considered, ordered hierarchically by stage of acquisition: (1) monoclausal extended predicates consisting of a verb (modal, aspectual, or evaluative) marked for tense or mood and followed by one or more complements in the infinitive – e.g., yaxol la-asot ‘can, is able to-do’; (2) coreferential interclausal predicate chaining; (...)
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  37.  15
    Naturalizating Morality. From Alethic to Deontic and Axiological Values: The Case of Tocar, a Colombian Spanish Verb.Jonathan Restrepo Rodas, Laura Niño Buitrago & Mercedes Suárez - 2022 - Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso 20:77-99.
    Great thinkers have devoted to explaining morality and ethics in human beings. The major reflections have resulted in a well-known dichotomy, that of matters of fact and matters of value, or what is known as the theoretical world, which is objective, and the practical world, that of affections. With the birth of analytic philosophy, the emphasis is placed on language allowing to explain philosophical problems, such as validity. This study proposes the following thesis: it is possible to derive “ought” from (...)
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  38.  28
    Modality of Obligation as a Legal Phenomenon.Elena Z. Kireeva - 2017 - International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique 30 (1):129-150.
    This article discusses deontic modality in the context of legal documents and its divergence from the natural, conventional, interpretation. This work demonstrates that the meaning of the performative verb is not purely linguistic. A number of non-linguistic factors cause the variation of meanings of performatives, in this case, when expressing prohibition, permission, recommendation, advice, proposal or request. These factors include: status of the addressee, type of the relationship between the author and the addressee, type of the document, possibility of control (...)
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  39. The interpretation of indefinites in future tense sentences. A novel argument for the modality of will?Fabio Del Prete - 2014 - In Mikhail Kissine, Philippe de Brabanter & Saghie Sharifzadeh, Oxford Studies of Time in Language and Thought.
    The chapter considers two semantic issues concerning will-sentences: Stalnaker’s Asymmetry and modal subordination in Karttunen-type discourses. The former points to a distinction between will and modal verbs, seeming to show that will does not license non-specific indefinites. The latter, conversely, suggests that will-sentences involve some kind of modality. To account for the data, the chapter proposes that will is semantically a tense, hence it doesn’t contribute a quantifier over modal alternatives; a modal feature, however, is (...)
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  40.  17
    Eventive modal projection: the case of Spanish subjunctive relative clauses.Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Paula Menéndez-Benito & Aynat Rubinstein - 2024 - Natural Language Semantics 32 (2):135-176.
    How do modal expressions determine which possibilities they range over? According to the Modal Anchor Hypothesis (Kratzer in _The language-cognition interface: Actes du 19_ _e_ _congrès international des linguistes_, Libraire Droz, Genève, 179–199, 2013 ), modal expressions determine their domain of quantification from particulars (events, situations, or individuals). This paper presents novel evidence for this hypothesis, focusing on a class of Spanish relative clauses that host verbs inflected in the subjunctive. Subjunctive in Romance is standardly taken (...)
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  41.  31
    The semiotics of motion encoding in Early English: a cognitive semiotic analysis of phrasal verbs in Old and Middle English.Sergio Torres-Martínez - 2023 - Semiotica 2023 (251):55-91.
    This paper offers a renewed construction grammar analysis of linguistic constructions in a diachronic perspective. The present theory, termedAgentive Cognitive Construction Grammar(AgCCxG), is informed byactive inference(AIF), a process theory for the comprehension of intelligent agency. AgCCxG defends the idea that language bear traces of non-linguistic, bodily-acquired information that reflects sémiotico-biological processes of energy exchange and conservation. One of the major claims of the paper is that embodied cognition has evolved to facilitate ontogenic mental alignment among humans. This is demonstrated by (...)
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  42. Dividing things up: The semantics of or and the modal/or interaction.Mandy Simons - 2005 - Natural Language Semantics 13 (3):271-316.
    In this paper, the meanings of sentences containing the word or and a modal verb are used to arrive at a novel account of the meaning of or coordinations. It is proposed that or coordinations denote sets whose members are the denotations of the disjuncts; and that the truth conditions of sentences containing or coordinations require the existence of some set made available by the semantic environment which can be ‘divided up’ in accordance with the disjuncts. The relevant notion (...)
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  43. Relational Semantics and Domain Semantics for Epistemic Modals.Dilip Ninan - 2018 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 47 (1):1-16.
    The standard account of modal expressions in natural language analyzes them as quantifiers over a set of possible worlds determined by the evaluation world and an accessibility relation. A number of authors have recently argued for an alternative account according to which modals are analyzed as quantifying over a domain of possible worlds that is specified directly in the points of evaluation. But the new approach only handles the data motivating it if it is supplemented with a non-standard account (...)
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  44.  69
    Strong Noncontingency: On the Modal Logics of an Operator Expressively Weaker Than Necessity.Jie Fan - 2019 - Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 60 (3):407-435.
    Operators can be compared in at least two respects: expressive strength and deductive strength. Inspired by Hintikka’s treatment of question embedding verbs, the variations of noncontingency operator, and also the various combinations of modal operators and Boolean connectives, we propose a logic with strong noncontingency operator as the only primitive modality. The novel operator is deductively but not expressively stronger than both noncontingency operator and essence operator, and expressively but not deductively weaker than the necessity operator. The frame-definability (...)
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  45.  19
    Investigating the Semantic Development of Modal Markers: The Role of Context.Tomaž Potočnik & Matej Hriberšek - 2019 - Clotho 1 (2):35-53.
    The article tackles the problem of studying diachronic semantic changes of modal markers in Latin. It proposes to do so by using context as a proxy for tracing the development of otherwise unchanging forms. In the first part, the main theoretical positions in modality studies are presented, especially the notions of deontic modality, epistemic modality, and pathways of modality. In the second part, Heine’s model for studying the role of context in language change is presented and applied to the (...)
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  46.  82
    Sublexical modality and the structure of lexical semantic representations.Jean-Pierre Koenig & Anthony R. Davis - 2001 - Linguistics and Philosophy 24 (1):71-124.
    This paper argues for a largely unnoted distinction between relational and modal components in the lexical semantics of verbs. Wehypothesize that many verbs encode two kinds of semantic information:a relationship among participants in a situation and a subset ofcircumstances or time indices at which this relationship isevaluated. The latter we term sublexical modality.We show that linking regularities between semantic arguments andsyntactic functions provide corroborating evidence in favor of thissemantic distinction, noting cases in which the semantic groundingof linking (...)
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  47.  70
    Now, Imagine an Actually Existing Unicorn: On Russellian Worries for Modal Meinongianism.Andreas de Jong - 2020 - Axiomathes 31 (3):365-380.
    Modal Meinongianism provides the semantics of sentences involving intentional verbs Priest. To that end, Modal Meinongianism employs a pointed non-normal quantified modal logic model. Like earlier Meinongian views Modal Meinongianism has a characterisation principle, that claims that any condition whatsoever is satisfied by some object in some world. Recently, Everett has proposed an argument against QCP that, if successful, gives rise to problems identical to those Russell raised for Naïve Meinongianism, namely that it allows for (...)
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  48.  95
    Why will is not a modal.Mikhail Kissine - 2008 - Natural Language Semantics 16 (2):129-155.
    In opposition to a common assumption, this paper defends the idea that the auxiliary verb will has no other semantic contribution in contemporary English than a temporal shift towards the future with respect to the utterance time. Strong reasons for rejecting the idea that will quantifies over possible worlds are presented. Given the adoption of Lewis’s and Kratzer’s views on modality, the alleged ‘modal’ uses of will are accounted for by a pragmatic mechanism which restricts the domain of the (...)
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  49. Time and modality without tenses or modals.Maria Bittner - 2011 - In Renate Musan & Monika Rathert, Tense across Languages. Niemeyer. pp. 147--188.
    In English, discourse reference to time involves grammatical tenses interpreted as temporal anaphors. Recently, it has been argued that conditionals involve modal discourse anaphora expressed by a parallel grammatical system of anaphoric modals. Based on evidence from Kalaallisut, this paper argues that temporal and modal anaphora can be just as precise in a language that does not have either grammatical category. Instead, temporal anaphora directly targets eventualities of verbs, without mediating tenses, while modal anaphora involves anaphoric (...)
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  50.  63
    Incorporation and Alleged Epistemic Modals.Peter Ludlow - 2017 - Topoi 36 (1):155-159.
    Part of what makes working with modals such a tricky business is that apparent modal forms are deployed in all sorts of ways in language. In this paper I explore an interesting example of an apparent modal—the Blofeld case—which was introduced by Gilles and von Fintel as part of their argument against context of assessment accounts of epistemic modals. I argue that the example is subtle, and that the apparent modal may not be an epistemic modal (...)
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