EPISTEMIC MODALITY AND PERFECT MORPHOLOGY IN SPANISH AND FRENCH

Brenda Laca (1)

1 SFL - Structures Formelles du Langage

In this paper, we examine the hypothesis that modal verbs in epistemic readings require a simultaneous temporal perspective in the light of the morphological evidence from Romance languages, in which modal verbs are fully inflected for TMA categories, paying particular attention to the interaction of modal verbs with perfect morphology. We first show that the semantic formulation of the hypothesis, based on the type of temporal perspective required, fares much better than the syntactic formulation, which requires epistemic modals to outscope tense. Secondly, we compare the linearizations of perfect morphology in French and Spanish by contrasting perfect infinitives with higher perfects. We show that Spanish exhibits a clear preference for the former, whereas French shows a clear preference for the latter, thus indicating the existence of variation. This variation is probably due to a diachronic process of perfect raising which correlates with the 'aoristic drift' of the perfect.

Mots clés: Perfect tenses; Modal verbs

Domaines: Linguistique

Brenda Laca. EPISTEMIC MODALITY AND PERFECT MORPHOLOGY IN SPANISH AND FRENCH. 2016. ⟨hal-01372980⟩