Please join us this Friday as Guillaume Thomas (Linguistics, University of Toronto) presents work on modality.

Date and time: Friday, April 29, 10:00 – 11:50 a.m.

Location: Rosenwald 208 (Linguistics seminar room)

Title: Modal Economy and the temporal orientation of circumstantial modals

Abstract:

Condoravdi (2002) observed that the perfect aspect cannot take scope below metaphysical modals and argued that this restriction is due to a constraint on the use of modal operators that she called the Diversity Condition (see also Giannakidou 1999). More recently, Abusch (2012) challenged Condoravdi’s analysis by identifying instances of circumstantial modals that are subject to the same scope restriction but that cannot be analyzed as metaphysical modals. Abusch argued from this observation that Condoravdi’s use of the Diversity Condition was incorrect. In this talk, I will argue that Abusch’s examples can actually be analyzed with the Diversity Condition, and I will attempt to explain why not all circumstantial modals are subject to this constraint. I will also argue that the Diversity Condition must be reduced to an economy condition that prohibits trivial uses of modal operators.