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Roots of Modality Aynat Rubinstein University of Massachusetts Amherst, Fon [email protected]

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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Open Access Dissertations 9-2012 Roots of Modality Aynat Rubinstein University of Massachusetts Amherst, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations Part of the Linguistics Commons Recommended Citation Rubinstein, Aynat, "Roots of Modality" (2012). Open Access Dissertations. 623. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/623 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ROOTS OF MODALITY A Dissertation Presented by AYNAT RUBINSTEIN Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2012 Department of Linguistics c Copyright by Aynat Rubinstein 2012 All Rights Reserved ROOTS OF MODALITY A Dissertation Presented by AYNAT RUBINSTEIN Approved as to style and content by: Angelika Kratzer, Chair Rajesh Bhatt, Member Kai von Fintel, Member Robert A. Rothstein, Member Margaret Speas, Department Head Department of Linguistics To Eshel, Imma, and Yanir ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation is a landmark in a journey that started far away, on a mountain that is always green on the other side of the ocean. I am grateful to my parents, who raised me with love and wisdom, and an unwavering encouragement to pursue my dreams. I am grateful for my brother, who has been a pillar of strength throughout this journey. And I am grateful to the Nirim for making sure to send Eshel to the Scouts. I would not have made it to this moment without Eshel, and I thank him for every year and every hour of being together. I wish to express my deep and heartfelt gratitude to my advisor, Angelika Kratzer, and to Rajesh Bhatt, Kai von Fintel, and Robert Rothstein, my committee members. First and foremost, I thank Angelika – for being a wonderful teacher and guide, for challenging and encouraging me constantly, and for the many hours we spent together talking about modality. I will miss these dearly. I thank Rajesh for his optimism, and for making this study not just about English and not just about semantics. I thank Kai for his interest in this project and for inspiring discussions that taught me a great deal about how semantics should be done. Finally, I thank Bob for being such a careful reader, and for teaching me about Yiddish. I am grateful to have been raised intellectually in the village that is the Department of Linguistics at UMass Amherst. I thank Chris Potts for being a source of inspiration and encouragement since my very first semester in Amherst and, later, across the country from the West Coast. I thank Lyn Frazier for being a true teacher and mentor, and for sharing her knowledge and enthusiasm whenever I came through her door. To Valentine Hacquard I am indebted for teaching an exciting proseminar on modality and for supporting my first steps v in this field. John Kingston, Kyle Johnson, Peggy Speas, and Tom Roeper are to thank for playing important roles in shaping my broader interests as a linguist. I am especially grateful to Paul Portner – for reading parts of the dissertation and provid- ing thoughtful comments on the material in Chapter2, and for inspiring conversations about mood and modality. For stimulating discussions when they passed through South College, I thank Malte Zimmermann, Anna Szabolcsi, Philippe Schlenker, Roger Schwarzschild, Mar´ıa Arche, Pranav Anand, Floris Roelofsen, Hans Kamp, Chris Kennedy, Lisa Matthew- son, Ana Arregui, and Kyle Rawlins. My fellow students and colleagues are to thank for keeping my spirits up intellectually and otherwise during this journey. Thank you Amy Rose Deal, Annahita Farudi, Chris Davis, Karen Jesney, Kathryn Pruitt, Mar´ıa Biezma, and Masashi Hashimoto, for being such a great cohort. Thank you Cherlon Ussery, Andrew McKenzie, Florian Schwarz, Shai Cohen, Jan Anderssen, Ilaria Frana, Anne-Michelle Tessier, Keir Moulton, Mike Key, He- len Majewski, and Michael Becker for sharing your “higher class” and wisdom. Thank you Kathy Adamczyk, Tom Maxfield, and Sarah Vega-Liros for lending a hand and an ear on so many occasions. Thanks to Ruth Kramer for sharing the best coffee there is in D.C. as the final parts of the dissertation were written, and to Valentine Hacquard, Elena Her- burger, and Graham Katz, who joined in. I am also fortunate to have crossed academic and personal paths with Paula Menendez-Benito,´ Magda Oiry, E. Allyn Smith, Ofra Magidor, Reut Tsarfaty, Nora Boneh, Galit W. Sassoon, and Jennifer Rau. I hope our paths will cross again. During my graduate studies, I had the fortune to participate in two ESSLLI summer schools. Courses with Denis Bonnay, Craige Roberts, and Judith Tonhauser were partic- ularly important in broadening my horizons as a semanticist. In the Fall of 2009, I had the unique opportunity to visit the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem and the Technion in Haifa. I thank Doron Rubinstein from the Academy and Alon Itai from the Technion for their hospitality and for providing me with excellent research environ- vi ments throughout my visit. I gratefully acknowledge a fellowship from the Department of Linguistics at UMass that made this visit possible. This work has roots in semantics and in discourse that can, and should, be traced back to Tel Aviv University. I am deeply grateful to Fred Landman and Rachel Giora, my teachers and mentors in Tel Aviv, and to Mira Ariel, Yoad Winter, Tal Siloni, Julia Horvath, Chuck Kisseberth, and Shuly Wintner, for supporting my entry into the world of linguistics. It took my father less than ten minutes to realize that Amherst and Northampton come pretty close to being paradise on Earth. In the past years, I met wonderful people and made good friends in the Valley. Thank you to Tim and Caroline for a first home in the Hadley farmlands, to Tom Sadlowski for the best food and conversation, to Ram and Kim, Joe, Arun, Misato, Kathryn and Ryan, Annahita, and Lena for their friendship. Thank you, Cherlon, for always being there and for reminding me how to navigate this world with taste. Thank you to my parents’ friends, who are now my own, for coming to visit and being my family away from home. To Sam Bahn, Beth Latz, Ephraim, Sherry, and the extended Isaac-Rosen clan. And finally, Anat, Noa, Limor, Amir, Einat, Lilach, Dahlia, Nitsan, Naama, and Yuval – it’s been way too long. The next leg of this journey will hopefully bring us closer together again. vii ABSTRACT ROOTS OF MODALITY SEPTEMBER 2012 AYNAT RUBINSTEIN B.Sc., TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY M.A., TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Angelika Kratzer This dissertation explores the interplay of grammar and context in the interpretation of modal words like ought, necessary, and need. The empirical foci of the discussion are patterns in the use of strong and weak necessity modals in conversation, and the interpreta- tion of syntactically and semantically versatile modals like need in the various grammatical configurations they appear in across languages. It is argued that a sensitivity to collective commitments in a conversation is necessary for understanding certain aspects of modal strength, in particular the traditional distinction between strong and weak necessity modals (exhibited by must and ought to in English). It is proposed that strong necessity modals can only reference priorities that are presupposed to be collectively committed to, whereas weak necessity modals are evaluated with respect to a mixed bag of priorities, crucially including ones that are presupposed not to be collectively committed to. A domain restriction approach to weak necessity is adopted, following a demonstration that it is superior to a number of probabilistic alternatives. viii Modal verbs and adjectives that take both infinitival and nominal complements are shown to pattern alike across languages in requiring a teleological, or goal-oriented in- terpretation when their complements are not infinitives (but rather noun phrases or certain Complementizer Phrases). This limitation is lifted with infinitival complements, showing that transitive configurations of certain intensional verbs are not semantically equivalent to the infinitival configurations of the same verbs. A result of this research is a fine grained analysis of the differences between closely related necessity modals and attitude verbs. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................... v ABSTRACT ............................................................. viii LIST OF TABLES........................................................ xiii LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................... xiv CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ...................................................... 1 1.1 What it means for a necessity modal to be weak..........................1 1.2 Microvariation among necessity modals.................................4 1.3 Grammatical restrictions on the expression of priority modality.............5 2. WEAK NECESSITY MODALS AND MODAL DISCOURSE ................ 8 2.1 Grades of necessity..................................................8 2.2 Theoretical approaches to weak necessity.............................. 10 2.2.1 The comparative
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