Aspects of Modality by Valentine Hacquard B.A. Egyptology University of California, Los Angeles 2000 SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS AND PHILOSOPHY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN LINGUISTICS AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY SEPTEMBER 2006 © 2006 Valentine Hacquard. All rights reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature of Author: ______________________________________________________ Department of Linguistics and Philosophy August 15, 2006 Certified by: _____________________________________________________________ Kai von Fintel Professor of Linguistics Thesis Supervisor Certified by: _____________________________________________________________ Irene Heim Professor of Linguistics Thesis Supervisor Accepted by:_____________________________________________________________ Irene Heim Professor of Linguistics Linguistics Section Head, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy 2 Aspects of Modality by Valentine Hacquard Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy on August 15, 2006 in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of PhD in Linguistics ABSTRACT 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 contextually- provided accessibility relations (cf. Lewis 1973, Kratzer 1981). Equally robust, however, are the phenomena that suggest that epistemics and a subset of deontics are interpreted higher than the remaining flavors (subsumed under the label ‘root modals’). The goal of this dissertation is to show that a unified analysis of modal auxiliaries is maintainable, while still providing some principled explanation for the relative ordering of tense, aspect and the various modals in Cinque’s (1999) hierarchy, based on evidence in French and Italian. To make sense of the relative scope of modals w.r.t. tense and aspect, I start with the empirical puzzle that aspect interacts differently with the various modal flavors. Perfective aspect on roots in French and Italian yields ‘actuality entailments’ (cf. Bhatt 1999), that is, an uncancelable inference that the proposition expressed by the complement holds in the actual world, and not merely in some possible world(s). I propose that this inference obtains when aspect scopes above the modal, and must therefore take the actual world as its world argument. Because epistemics/deontics are interpreted above aspect, they are immune to the effect. To derive the height generalization, I propose to relativize the accessibility relation of a modal to an event, instead of a world: the accessibility relation has a free event variable, which needs to be bound locally, either by aspect (i.e., a quantifier over events), the speech event, or an embedding attitude verb. Further selectional restrictions on the event type each accessibility relation requires limits the possible combinations of event binders and accessibility relations. The resulting binding possibilities reduce the systematic constraints on the range of a modal’s interpretations to independently-motivated syntactic assumptions on locality and movement, and explain why the various flavors of the same modal auxiliaries are interpreted at different heights. Thesis Supervisors: Kai von Fintel, Irene Heim Title: Professors of Linguistics 3 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This has been quite an adventure, and were it not 3 o’clock in the morning two days before I have to move, I would say that I’d do it all over again. What made it worth the while was all of the people involved in this journey, and I would like to take these few lines to thank them from the bottom of my heart. First and foremost, the members of my committee: Irene Heim, Kai von Fintel, Sabine Iatridou and Gennaro Chierchia. All four of them are amazing linguists and people, and I am incredibly grateful to have had the chance to work with them. Irene’s contribution to this dissertation and to my academic life in general is invaluable. I probably do not need to tell the world how brilliant and inspiring Irene is; the world already knows. I would like to thank her particularly for her support and her generosity with her time and ideas. I had my first semantic class with Irene, and ever since, she has always been extremely encouraging, even in my densest moments. I would not be a semanticist without her. I am also very lucky to have had Kai co-chair my committee. I have learned tremendously from him, and this dissertation has greatly benefited from his vast knowledge, his precision, his insightful ideas and his sharpening of my own ideas. I am especially indebted to him for his superhuman attempts to combat my sloppiness. I am also very grateful to Sabine, the linguist, for teaching me to pay attention to morphology and cross- linguistic generalizations, and Sabine, the person, for teaching me how important it is to create your own path. Sabine also played a key role in my finding the topic of my dissertation. I was working on the interaction of modal constructions and aspect in general, and I knew that she would not believe any proposal I would have that couldn’t reconcile the various readings of modal auxiliaries. ‘Fine, I thought, I’ll figure out these modals and then move on’. Needless to say, I am still trying to figure them out… Finally, I am immensely indebted to the LSA summer Institute for having brought Gennaro into my academic life. Gennaro has been an invaluable source of support during the past year. Appointments with him were always inspiring and always managed to reconcile me with my thesis, no matter how mad I was at it beforehand. I am also grateful to have had wonderful teachers at MIT: Noam Chomsky, Michel DeGraff, Suzanne Flynn, Michael Kenstowicz, Wayne O’Neil, David Pesetsky, Norvin Richards, Donca Steriade, Ken Wexler, and especially Danny Fox and Alec Marantz, who both have been an incredible source of inspiration, and have helped me become a better linguist. I would like to thank my classmates from Ling-01, both collectively and distributively: Pranav Anand, Allison Adler, Justin Fitzpatrick, Andres Salanova, Shoichi Takahashi, and Mary Ann Walter. Ling-01 was my first family in Cambridge, and I probably would not have survived a month in grad school without them: thanks for the many tutorials in all areas of linguistics and for all the great memories. I am also very grateful to have found a second family in Cambridge, my roommates at the Magazine St apartment: Marta Abrusan, Lauren Ashwell, Jon Gajewski, Dan Giblin, Nathan Klinedinst (for too short a while), Ivona Kucerova, Alejandro Perez-Carballo, and Michael Wagner, who’ve assumed at various times the roles of confident, teacher, personal trainer, bandmate, gourmet chef, and so many more. Thanks for the good times, for the support, and for putting up with me! 5 Many thanks to the MIT L&P students not already mentioned above, in particular: Asaf Bachrach, Teal Bissell, Martina Gracanin, Elena Guerzoni, Sarah Hulsey, Feng-Fan Hsieh, Heather Logue, Bernard Nickel, Joey Sabbagh, Tamina Stephenson, Linnaea Stockall, Katia Vavona, and Seth Yalcin. I have also greatly benefited from discussions with people from the greater linguistics community, in particular Rajesh Bhatt, without whose work this dissertation would not exist, Cleo Condoravdi, Bridget Copley, Martin Hackl, Michela Ippolito, Roumi Pancheva, and Barry Schein. In the spring of 2005, I spent a semester at UCLA, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone there for their warm welcome. I am particularly indebted to Philippe Schlenker and Tim Stowell, for being extremely generous with their time and ideas. Last but not least, I would like to thank Dominique Sportiche, without whom I wouldn’t be a linguist. Many thanks to my Italian informants (and friends and teachers) Paolo Santorio, Maria Giavazzi, Luisa Meroni, and especially Andrea Gualmini. Many thanks to Nick Stecher for his love and support, for believing in me and reminding me, when I needed it most, that there is actually a whole world beyond possible worlds. Thanks to my family: my mother, my father, Claire, Daphné and Olympio Hacquard for their support and for serving as very patient informants. Finally, I would like to thank my grand-parents, to whom I dedicate this dissertation, Diana Tsan, Georges and Juliette Hacquard, for teaching me, through their examples and their encouragements that curiosity is not a ‘vilain défaut’. Merci! 6 TABLE OF CONTENT INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................. 11 1. ACTUALITY ENTAILMENT OR ACTUALITY IMPLICATURE? ................................................ 16 1.1. THE ROLE OF ASPECT ..................................................................................................... 17 1.2. ASPECT COMPETITION EFFECTS AND PRAGMATIC REASONING....................................... 20 2. EPISTEMIC VS ROOT INTERPRETATIONS: A SPLIT IN IMPLICATIVE BEHAVIOR............... 22 3. OUTLINE OF THE DISSERTATION ......................................................................................... 26 CHAPTER 1: MODAL AUXILIARIES: ASPECT AND ACTUALITY ENTAILMENTS.......................