Speaker: Maa Mo?nik (MIT)
Title: Where Force Matters: Life under Doxastic Attitudes
Date and time: Wednesday, April 25, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
There has been much recent interest in the analysis and distribution of embedded epistemic modals (Yalcin 2007, Anand and Hacquard 2013, a.o.). We present novel data using the embedding verb dopu?ati (‘to allow for the possibility that’) from Slovenian, analysed as an existential doxastic attitude. Building on Anand and Hacquard (2013), we focus on the distribution of existential and universal epistemic modals under doxastics. When anchored to the attitude holder, modals like must show a contrast: they are acceptable under positive universal doxastics (Suppose you wake up late one morning and, before opening your eyes, you remark: I think it must be sunny outside!), but are not as acceptable under: dopu?ati, negated universal doxastics (regardless of neg-raising), and negated dopu?ati. Building on Yalcin (2007) and Mandelkern (2017, ch. 1), we propose a new constraint on epistemic modals (while maintaining duality) and use blind scalar implicatures (Magri 2009, 2011) to capture their restricted distribution under doxastic attitudes. A sentence like #Dopu?am, da mora deevati (‘I allow for the possibility that it must be raining’) becomes contextually equivalent to I think it must be raining and therefore falls out as odd in the same way as Magri’s #Some Italians come from a warm country does.
This will be a practice talk for FASL. Here is the most recent version of the abstract.