It is a cross-linguistically robust fact that the same modal auxiliaries come in different flavors: epistemic, deontic, ability, teleological... This fact is neatly captured in a system where each modal has a single lexical entry, where the difference in flavor comes from contextuallyprovided accessibility relations (cf. Lewis 1973, Kratzer 1981). Equally robust, however, are the phenomena that...

In this paper we argue that the different scopal relations that deontic modal auxiliaries cross-linguistically exhibit can be explained by assuming that (i) polarity effects arise in the domain of universal deontic modals and therefore not in the domain of existential deontic modals; and (ii) that all deontic modals must be interpreted VP in situ if their polarity requirements allow for that.

This paper provides a semantic analysis of restrictions on quantification into doxastic modals uncovered by von Fintel and Iatridou (2003). The restrictions are made to follow from the architecture of a new theory of semantic interpretation, deriving from an asymmetry in the introduction of doxastic and non-doxastic modal bases. The analysis can be seen as a concrete extension of Kratzer (1991)...

Romanian auxiliary verbs exhibit certain peculiar properties that set them aside from other Romance counterparts. It will be suggested that the di erences between Romanian auxiliaries and French and Italian auxiliaries can be accounted for in terms of di erent syntactic structures. While in French and in Italian the auxiliary verb, the non nite one and the complements combine in a at structure,...

The main idea of this research is to analyse the English modals in Obama's speech semantically. modal auxiliaries selected for analysis include (Will, Would, Can, Could, and Should). All are interpreted based on framework Coates’ (1983) semantic clusters. qualitative method applied into study. auxiliary ‘can’ signifying possibility functions evoke positive emotions connotations mind all listene...

Evidentiality is one of the important issues in the recent studies of linguistic typology whereby the Korean evidentials are not so much talked about. In Korean the evidentiality is not so systematically represented as other grammatical categories such as tense or honorifics. But it does have some means for evidential expression. The past retrospective ending -deohas this function. And the 'say...