The weakness of must: In defense of a Mantra  

Oleh:

Lassiter, Daniel

Jenis: Article from Proceeding
Dalam koleksi: Proceedings of the 24th Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference, held at New York University, May 30th - June 1st, 2014, page 597-618.
Topik: epistemic modality; doxastic modality; evidentiality; inference; probability
Fulltext: 33. 2985-3269-1-PB.pdf (212.04KB)

Isi artikel

Many linguist have claimed that must’s meaning is weaker than epistemic necessity—a claim dubbed “the Mantra” in an influential recent paper by von Fintel & Gillies (2008). von Fintel & Gillies argue that the Mantra is false, and that the intuitions that have driven it can be accounted for by appealing to evidential meaning: must requires that the proposition it embeds is true and maximally certain, but also known only by indirect means. I show that von Fintel & Gillies do not provide a compelling argument against the Mantra, and that their theory of evidential meaning, while promising in certain respects, also has serious empirical and conceptual problems. In addition, a variety of corpus examples indicate that speakers who assert must p are not always maximally confident in the truth of p. As an alternative, I re-implement von Fintel & Gillies’ theory of indirect evidentiality in a probabilistic, Mantra-compatible framework. Ultimately, both sides of the debate are partly right: must is weak in several respects, but it also encodes an indirect evidential meaning.

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