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Covert Modality in Non-Finite Contexts University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons IRCS Technical Reports Series Institute for Research in Cognitive Science January 2000 Covert Modality in Non-Finite Contexts Rajesh Bhatt University of Pennsylvania Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/ircs_reports Bhatt, Rajesh, "Covert Modality in Non-Finite Contexts" (2000). IRCS Technical Reports Series. 32. https://repository.upenn.edu/ircs_reports/32 University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science Technical Report No. IRCS-00-01. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/ircs_reports/32 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Covert Modality in Non-Finite Contexts Abstract This dissertation investigates the distribution and interpretation of covert modality. Three environments where covert modality appears are analyzed. These environments are infinitival relative clauses, infinitival questions, and ability modals. Infinitival relative clauses are shown to not form a unified class structurally. Subject infinitival relative clauses are assimilated to the class of reduced relative clauses. They lack a CP projection. Non-subject infinitival relative are assimilated to the class of full relative clauses. Like full relatives, they have a CP projection. The infinitival [+wh] Cº is argued to be the source of the modality in a non-subject infinitival relative clause. All nonsubject infinitival relative clauses and infinitival questions involve modality because of the obligatory presence of the infinitival [+wh] Cº. Since subject infinitival relative clauses do not involve the infinitival [+wh] Cº, they are not necessarily modal. If they are modal, the source of the modality lies within the infinitival clause. The conditions under which a subject infinitival relative can receive a non-modal interpretation are analyzed. It is shown that a non-modal interpretation must be licensed and that only a limited class of modifiers (superlatives, ordinals, and only) in a particular configuration can license the non-modal interpretation. The licensing configuration obtains under reconstruction of the head NP of the relative clause. The basic result regarding themodality in infinitival questions is that despite the apparent variability in the nature (deontic vs. circumstantial) and the force of this modality, we really have just one modality. The apparent variation in force and nature falls out from the interaction between the semantics of the infinitival [+wh] C0 and contextual factors. The apparent variation in the force and nature of the infinitival questionmodality is also found in non-subject infinitival relative clauses. The proposal for capturing variable modality effects in infinitival questions is extended to non-subject infinitival relatives. A covert modal (the Generic operator) is responsible for the modality in an ability modal. The ability modal itself has the semantics of an implicative verb like manage. Comments University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science Technical Report No. IRCS-00-01. This thesis or dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/ircs_reports/32 COVERT MODALITY IN NON-FINITE CONTEXTS Rajesh Bhatt ADISSERTATION in Linguistics Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1999 Sabine Iatridou Anthony S. Kroch Supervisor of Dissertation Supervisor of Dissertation Irene Heim Ellen F. Prince Committee Member Committee Member George Cardona Graduate Group Chairperson c Copyright 2000 by Rajesh Bhatt Acknowledgements I have definitely read more acknowledgements in dissertations than I have dissertations. I always thought that writing acknowledgements would be the easiest and the fun-est part of writing a dissertation. Hence I procrastinated this task. So much so that here I am, three hours before my date with the margin lady, wondering where to begin. A quick sample of the dissertations on my desk reveals that the custom is to start by thanking one’s supervisors and committee members. I will follow this eminently reasonable custom and not be heterodox and distracting. Sabine Iatridou is a force of nature. There is no other way to describe her. I have had her as a teacher in several classes, had innumerable appointments with her, TA’d for her, worked as her research assistant on the Counterfactuals project, and benefitted from her powerful and free-ranging intellect in ways that go beyond modality and infinitives. She has often sat up with me way past her bedtime and sometimes mine to discuss talks, hand- outs, abstracts, and ideas. Continuing the nature motif, Sabine has an incredible ability to see the forest for the trees. I have often gone to her with confused formulations of ideas especially in connection with this document and she has come up with simple and more insightful formulations. I could go on but I’ll stop by saying that I cannot even imagine what graduate school in linguistics would have been like if she hadn’t been around. I have learnt many things about linguistics and how to do linguistics from Tony Kroch. In particular, I have been inspired by his work with Aravind Joshi on the linguistic aspects of Tree Adjoining Grammars and his work on syntactic change in a historical context. Tony was always willing to discuss various aspects of syntax and life with me. His conviction that one should be wary of superficial technical solutions continues to inform my thinking. I am very glad that he agreed to co-supervise my dissertation with Sabine. I would also iii like to thank him for very insightful comments on my dissertation draft. I first saw Irene Heim when I sat in on her and Kai’s seminar on Tense in the Spring of 1997. I was immediately very impressed by how much she knew and her teaching style. But I was so much in awe of her that it took me eight months to get my nerve up to make my first appointment with her and ask her to be on my committee. Since that first appointment, my appointments with her have become a regular feature of my linguistic life. Irene has been very generous with her time and her well-stocked library has saved me many a trip to the library. Regarding this dissertation, I am doubly indebted to her: many of the ideas discussed here came up during our appointments, and then her detailed comments on the written versions of those ideas were very valuable in developing them further. Ellen Prince’s role in my graduate career at Penn is not limited to her being on my dissertation committee. In my first year at Penn, I took her Pragmatics classes. Those classes and Ellen’s writings on the arbitrariness of the mapping between syntactic structure and discourse function have shaped my thinking about the discourse-syntax interface. On a more personal level, Ellen has always been very supportive of my endeavours. Also she was the source of the first truffles that I ever ate. This dissertation was written partly at Penn and partly at MIT. I consider myself very fortunate to have had the opportunity to be affiliated with both these departments. I would like to thank Sabine for making it possible for me to spend extended periods of time at MIT. Going back a little in time to 1989-1993 when I was working on an undergraduate degree in Computer Science at IIT Kanpur - in the summer of 1991, for reasons that were far removed from any kind of latent interest in language, I asked Rajeev Sangal if he had a summer project opening. It turned out that he did and this job involved reading Radford’s Transformational Grammar book. I was quite surprised to find out that language had structure and was hooked from that point onwards. At IIT-K, I would like to thank Vineeth Chaitanya, B. N. Patnaik, and Achla Raina for linguistic conversations and Bhandari Uncle and Bharti Auntie for taking care of me, inviting me for dinner quite often, and letting me invite myself every so often. Aravind Joshi’s and George Cardona’s visits to IIT-K in 1992 and my meetings with them strongly influenced my decision to come to Penn. I am glad that they came and that iv they encouraged me to apply. Dr. Joshi has also supported all my summers at Penn for which I am very grateful. I have enjoyed discussing TAGs, and the syntax of South Asian languages with him. He is also responsible through IRCS and in other ways for making Penn the place to be for people who are interested in language and computation. George has always been willing to answer my questions about how any given construction works in some South Asian language or the other. Also as Graduate Chair, he has been very supportive for which I thank him. I would also like to thank all my other teachers at Penn: Gene Buckley, Peter Bune- man, Robin Clark, Surendra Gambhir, Vijay Gambhir, Michael Hegarty, Bill Labov, Mark Liberman, Dale Miller, Rolf Noyer, Donald Ringe, Maribel Romero, Gillian Sankoff, Mark Steedman and Scott Weinstein and at MIT: Kai von Fintel, Ken Hale, Morris Halle, Alec Marantz, Shigeru Miyagawa, David Pesetsky, and Ken Wexler. In my list of teachers, I would like to include Dave Embick and Roumi Izvorski. Ch. 2 of this dissertation has benefitted from detailed discussions with Dave Embick. I would also like to thank Roumi Izvorski, Chung-hye Han, and Rashmi Prasad for com- ments on various parts of the dissertation. Thanks also to Karlos Arregi-Urbina and Martin Hackl for going through the chapters I gave them. I have enjoyed collaborating with the following people on various projects: Elena Anagnostopoulou, Tonia Bleam, Dave Embick, Chung-hye Han, Roumi Izvorski, and Anoop Sarkar. For their friendship and stimulating linguistic discussion, I would like to thank in addition to the people listed above Mickey Chandrasekhar, Miriam Eckert, Jason Eis- ner, Susan Garrett, Heidi Harley, Shudong Huang, Martin Kappus, Alan Lee, Hikyoung Lee, Jeff Lidz, Mimi Lipson, Martha Jo McGinnis, Naomi Nagy, Rashmi Prasad, Carlos Prolo, Owen Rambow, Dan Reynolds, Carmen Rio-Rey, Maribel Romero, Amanda Seidl- Friedman, Laura Siegel, Kieran Snyder, B.
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