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Tense, aspect, and modality in Spanish and French| old_uid | 4835 |
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| title | Tense, aspect, and modality in Spanish and French |
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| start_date | 2008/05/19 |
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| schedule | 14h-16h |
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| online | no |
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| details | Cet exposé remplace l'exposé de Patrick Caudal qui était prévu. |
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| summary | In this talk I investigate the interaction of tense, perfectivity and modality in Spanish and French, languages in which modal verbs exhibit full tense and aspect distinctions. I examine the possible interpretations of past indicative tenses, perfective and imperfective, on the modals of possibility and obligation. Imperfective tenses exhibit the expected modalized readings but perfective past tenses have unexpected entailments and implicatures, involving the (non) realisation of the embedded event. In Spanish there are three readings with a preterit modal: epistemic, implicative and counterfactual; only the first one has the expected averidicality of modals. French exhibits the first two but lacks the counterfactual reading, absent also in the Spanish perfecto. The semantic and pragmatic ingredients responsible for these readings are analyzed. I appeal to the relative scoping of the different operators, Kratzer’s (1991) theory of modality, and the effect of the modal on the domain of quantification to explain these readings. The analysis is confirmed by the interaction of Tense, Modality and Negation. The absence of the counterfactual reading in the French passé composé and the Spanish perfecto is explained by their semantics, which adds a persistent state incompatible with counterfactuality. |
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| oncancel | séance reportée jusqu'à nouvel ordre |
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| responsibles | Copley |
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