Kai von Fintel

In "*Must* ...stay ...strong!" (von Fintel & Gillies 2010) we set out to slay a dragon, or rather what we called The Mantra: that epistemic *must* has a modal force weaker than expected from standard modal logic, that it doesn't entail its prejacent, and that the best explanation for the evidential feel of *must* is a pragmatic explanation. We argued that all three sub-mantras are wrong and offered an explanation according to which *must* is strong, entailing, and the felt indirectness is the product of an evidential presupposition carried by epistemic modals. Mantras being what they are, it is no surprise that each of the sub-mantras have been given new defenses. Here we offer them new problems and update our picture, concluding that *must* is (still) strong.

1 This paper has been presented at the workshop “Time and Modality: A Round Table on Tense, Mood, and Modality”, Paris, December 2005, at a CUNY linguistics colloquium in May 2006, and at the 6th Workshop on Formal Linguistics in Florian´opolis, Brazil, August 2006. We thank the audiences at those presentations, in particular Orin Percus, Tim Stowell, Marcel den Dikken, Anna Szabolcsi, Chris Warnasch, Roberta Pires de Oliveira, Renato Miguel Basso, and Ana M¨uller. We thank Noam Chomsky, Cleo Condoravdi, and Irene Heim for very helpful conversations about this material. We thank Bridget Copley for sharing with us her recent manuscript “What Should Should..

Why are some conditionals subjunctive? It is often assumed that at least one crucial difference is that subjunctive conditionals presuppose that their antecedent is false, that they are counterfactual (Lakoff 1970). The traditional theory has apparently been refuted. Perhaps the clearest counter-example is one given by Alan Anderson (1951: 37): If Jones had taken arsenic, he would have shown just exactly those symptoms which he does in fact show. A typical place to use such a subjunctive conditional would be in the course of an argument that tries to bolster the hypothesis that Jones did in fact take arsenic. But then it would of course be self-defeating to presuppose that the hypothesis is false. Thus, something else must be going on.

The compositional semantics of sentences like Only mammals give live birth and The flag flies only if the Queen is home is a tough problem. Evidence is presented to show that only here is modifying an underlying proposition (its ‘prejacent’). After discussing the semantics of only, the question of the proper interpretation of the prejacent is explored. It would be nice if the prejacent could be analyzed as having existential quantificational force. But that is difficult to maintain, since the prejacent structures when encountered on their own are naturally read as having a lawlike flavor, which in many analyses is attributed to the semantics of implicit operators alleged to be present in them. In the end, an analysis is presented which attributes some very particular properties to these operators and thereby succeeds in providing the target sentences with intuitively adequate interpretations. These complex constructions can therefore be used as a probe into the nature of implicit quantification in natural language

Epistemic modals are standardly taken to be context-dependent quantifiers over possibilities. Thus sentences containing them get truth-values with respect to both a context and an index. But some insist that this relativization is not relative enough: `might'-claims, they say, only get truth-values with respect to contexts, indices, and—the new wrinkle—points of assessment (hence, CIA). Here we argue against such "relativist" semantics. We begin with a sketch of the motivation for such theories and a generic formulation of them. Then we catalogue central problems that any such theory faces. We end by outlining an alternative story.

A primary goal of research in the semantics/pragmatics interface is to investigate the division of labor between the truth-conditional component of the meaning of an expression and other factors of a more pragmatic nature. One favorite strategy, associated foremost with Grice (1967, 1989), is to keep to a rather austere semantics and to derive the overall meaning of an utterance by predictable additional inferences, called ``implicatures,'' which are seen as based on certain principles of rational and purposeful interaction. In this chapter, I will explore a di¨erent way in which the truth-conditional component is complemented in context. Imagine that we have persuasive evidence that an expression a in context c expresses a proposition p. The straightforward way of capturing this in a semantic system is to attribute to a a context-dependent meaning that maps c to p in a systematic and adequate way.

* This work has been evolving for a while now. Some parts trace back to the few pages on the context-dependency of quantifiers in my dissertation. Reading Recanati’s paper on domains of discourse made me rethink some of my earlier conclusions without in the end actually changing them much. Other parts formed the material for several discussions in my seminar on context-dependency at MIT in the fall of 1995, which included several sessions exploring the issues raised in an early version of Kratzer. Connecting the choice function approach to indefinites with a general analysis of contextual domain restriction was an idea that I considered then without however working out any details. Conversations with Lisa Matthewson and studying her paper inspired me to tackle the problem again. Connections to questions about the context-dependency of conditional sentences also tickled my fancy, since I have been working on conditionals for a while now. Having the opportunity to present this material at the Vilem Mathesius Series provided the impetus to flesh out some of my vague thoughts. Major influences come from the work done in recent years at MIT by Lisa Matthewson, Philippe Schlenker, Julie Legate, and Uli Sauerland. I thank Irene Heim, Lisa Matthewson, Orin Percus, Philippe Schlenker, and Jason Stanley for illuminating discussions about this material. At this point, I see this talk as a report on the state of the art, exploring an intriguing possible connection, but I do not claim substantial intellectual property rights. Mistakes are certainly mine, achievements are probably not

After cataloguing various ‘improper’ sense of only, those which are taken with restricted scope (‘no more than [within a fixed domain]’) as opposed to the purely exclusive ‘proper’ sense, Ockham (1980:137) remarks that These are the senses, then, in which the exclusive expression can be taken improperly. And perhaps there are still other senses in which it can be taken improperly. But since they are not as widely used as the ones we have dealt with, I will leave them to the specialists. Larry Horn: “A glorious picture indeed: monasteries crammed to the spires with specialists on only, laboring away on the fine points of the semantics of exclusive propositions. Those were the days!” (Horn 1996: 26-27).