Epistemic modality devices are believed to be one of the prominent characteristics of research articles as the commonly used genre among the academic community members. Considering the importance of such devices in producing and comprehending scientific discourse, this study aimed to cross–culturally and cross-linguistically investigate epistemic modality markers as an important subcategory...

Note: This is a draft as of October 3, 2014 of a survey article now under review for the Companion to Semantics being prepared for Wiley by L. Matthewson, C. Meier, H. Rullmann, and E. Zimmermann. The intention is for the article to be engaging and accessible to students with 1 or 2 courses in formal semantics, so I’ve tried to keep it as non-technical and empiricallyoriented as possible. Sugge...

Saul Kripke’s thesis that ordinary proper names are rigid designators is supported by widely shared intuitions about the occurrence of names in ordinary modal contexts. By those intuitions names are scopeless with respect to the modal expressions. That is, sentences in a pair like (a) Aristotle might have been fond of dogs (b) Concerning Aristotle, it is true that he might have been fond of dog...