The interpretation of indefinites in future tense sentences: A novel argument for the modality of will?

Fabio Del Prete (1)

1 CLLE-ERSS - Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie

The chapter considers two semantic issues concerning will-sentences: Stalnaker's Asymmetry and modal subordination in Karttunen-type discourses. The former points to a distinction between will and modal verbs, seeming to show that will does not license non-specific indefinites. The latter, conversely, suggests that will-sentences involve some kind of modality. To account for the data, the chapter proposes that will is semantically a tense, hence it doesn't contribute a quantifier over modal alternatives; a modal feature, however, is introduced in the interpretation of a will-sentence through a supervaluational strategy universally quantifying over possible futures. That this is not part of will's lexical semantics is shown to have consequences that ultimately contribute to explain Stalnaker's Asymmetry. Furthermore, that a modal quantification is present in the interpretation of a will-sentence is shown to imply the availability of modal subordination in Karttunen-type discourses. Since the modal feature is not due to will's semantics but to a presumably universal property of the underlying temporal model, the observed modal behaviour is not viewed as a contingent property of will, and modal interpretations of future tense markers are expected to be available cross-linguistically.

Mots clés: Non-specific indefinites; Future; Tense; Supervaluations; Modal subordination; Branching Time; Modality

Domaines: Linguistique; Philosophie

Fabio Del Prete. The interpretation of indefinites in future tense sentences: A novel argument for the modality of will?. Philippe De Brabanter, Mikhail Kissine, and Saghie Sharifzadeh. Future Times, Future Tenses, Oxford University Press, 2014, Oxford Studies of Time in Language and Thought, 9780199679157. ⟨10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199679157.003.0003⟩. ⟨hal-00920890v3⟩