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

Domaines: Linguistique

Fabio Del Prete. The interpretation of indefinites in future tense sentences: A novel argument for the modality of will?. Oxford University Press. Future Times, Future Tenses, Oxford University Press, pp.320, 2014, Oxford Studies of Time in Language and Thought, 978-0-19-967915-7. ⟨hal-00920890v1⟩