the present paper sets out to investigate the syntactic category of persian modals, šâyad ‘perhaps’ and bâyad ‘must’. the syntactic category of the two modal elements has been viewed differently by different scholars. a number of scholars argue that both šâyad and bâyad are modal auxiliaries, while others claim that they both are modal adverbs. we propose that šâyad is a modal adverb and bâyad ...

This paper has two major goals. First, it provides a detailed empirical description of how the epistemic and metaphysical readings of the “non-root modal + Perf(ect) have” construction in English (e.g., John might have won the game yesterday) are expressed in Mandarin Chinese. The two readings both involve non-root modals for the past, i.e., non-root modals with either a past temporal perspecti...

Eye-tracking findings suggest people prefer to ground their spoken language comprehension by focusing on recently seen events more than anticipating future events: When the verb in NP1-VERB-ADV-NP2 sentences was referentially ambiguous between a recently depicted and an equally plausible future clipart action, listeners fixated the target of the recent action more often at the verb than the obj...

This paper investigates how linguistic expressions of time, in particular temporal adverbs and verb tense morphemes, are used to establish temporal reference at the level of brain physiology. First, a formal semantic analysis of tense and temporal adverbs is outlined. It is argued that computing temporal reference amounts to solving a constraint satisfaction problem. Next, the results of an eve...

Tense, temporal adverbs, and temporal connectives provide information about when events described in English sentences occur. To extract this temporal information from a sentence, it must be parsed into a semantic representation which captures the meaning of tense, temporal adverbs, and temporal connectives. Representations were developed for the basic tenses, some temporal adverbs, as well as ...

This paper provides an analysis of the temporal location adverb now. The core data comes from free indirect discourse, where now often co-occurs with the past tense and has an affinity for stative sentences. Building on Kamp & Reyle’s (1993) analysis, I propose that now is a perspective setting anaphor: it requires an eventuality described by an aspectual phrase to hold throughout a salient eve...

This two-part article critically reviews eight recent works in the field of mood and modality. Part I explores three different theoretical approaches – generative, cognitive–pragmatic, and typological – with the main focus on languages other than English. Within the framework of generative grammar, research issues include: the epistemic-root interpretations of modal verbs; transitive–intransiti...