Epistemic weakening with future and must : non veridicality, evidentiality, and partial knowledge

In this paper, we show that future morphemes in Greek and Italian have purely epistemic non-predictive readings, behaving as equivalent to English must. We call this use ‘epistemic future’. Epistemic future appears to have an evidential component: it cannot be used if the speaker knows, either via visual perception, or via a report, that the prejacent proposition p is true. This renders epistemic futures nonveridical, on a par with must (Giannakidou 1998, 1999, Giannakidou and Mari 2012a,b). The judgment with the future is epistemically weaker than an unmodalized assertion, and relies on partial knowledge supporting p. We show that partial knowledge is not indirect knowledge. Our analysis contrasts with von Fintel and Gillies 2010 who argue that must is ‘strong’, and further refines the classical ‘weak’ analysis of universal epistemic modals ( Kartunnen 1972, Kratzer 1981, Giannakidou 1998, 1999 and more recently Lassiter 2013). 1 Epistemic future: core data from English, Dutch,